Eroff History and Notes

[Jeff Conrad]

EroffT was an implementation of AT&T Version 2 troff that
specialized in support for HP LaserJetR printers.  Eroff also ran
on MS-DOS; nroff was available for around $100--a pretty good
deal for those who could live with monospaced output.  Especially
if they had to pay for it out of their own pockets.

Eroff was a product of Elan Computer group, founded in 1985 by
Ken Greer, formerly with HP.  Elan's first offices were in Palo
Alto at 410 Cambridge Ave; they later moved to Mountain View (the
next town to the south) at 888 Villa Street.

Eroff included the MM and MV macros (for viewgraphs; remember
them?).  We didn't find the latter terribly useful, so we made a
few extensions to MM for viewgraphs.  We made a fair number of
other extensions to MM; overall, Eroff worked quite well for us.

Early LaserJet printers had little in the way of built-in fonts
(I think Courier was it for the original), so Eroff included
downloadable fonts and kept a database of what had been
downloaded to each printer to minimize the downloads (many of our
printers were on 19.2 kbps serial lines, so minimizing downloads
was a big deal).

Elan later added a troff previewer for X--Elan Express--which was
nice but buggy--with a propensity to crash and close the window
with the error message before I could read the message; I found
this unamusing.

Realizing that markup languages weren't for everyone, Elan tried
to move to a GUI document prep system, Avalon Publisher
(https://www.techmonitor.ai/technology/elan_releases_new_publishing_system_t
o_run_under_open_look_and_x_window),
launched with a big party that I attended.  It had some features
that were ahead of their time, but the product wasn't very
successful; I don't think it made much of a dent in Interleaf's
or FrameMaker's markets.  Notably, it didn't support math, so it
wasn't a great tool for an engineering department, and we never
tried it.

With the introduction of groff, Elan essentially abandoned
Eroff--and at one point, actually suggested I use groff instead.
They eventually relied mainly on Elan License Manager, which
handled floating network licenses.  The company closed in 1997,
as I recall.

I've attached the chapter on the MM macros from the Eroff manual;
everything else I have is bound hardcopy.

EroffChapt5-mm.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document