Hello colleagues from the other BSD,

I have taken the nroff (not troff though) from 4.4BSD-Lite
after Caldera opened it and hacked it enough to make it not
segfault with -mdoc manual pages (except terminfo(5) which
has "too many text block diversions" for tbl); I also had
to fix some things in the mdoc macros (mostly "if" clause
related and hidden within .if g/t/n).

I admit it looks evil, has not been cleaned up at all, most
problems just have been "solved" by making the statically
allocated buffers AT&T seems to have liked in the old days
bigger and I rely on ProPolice to have no overflows, but
you might want to start from the code I have. I did fix some
faults discovered by OpenBSD's new mmap malloc, and I've
been using it to build every single manual page in the base
system and ports (like your pkgsrc) for years - with only
minor adaptions (e.g. some -man pages have a blank line
before the .TH which must be removed; mplayer.1 has macro
names longer than two chars (GNU extension) which I just
renamed).

I also have a tarball of files from a tape predating the
signing of the Berne convention by the USA with code I
could identify as "ditroff" (plus some tools); it doesn't
bear any copyright notices. However, I think we still can't
use it without any licence (at least, a non-US-citizen like
me). I can provide that if you can get the legal issues
done (I tried mailing BWK but got no reply).

Please reply to me too, I don't usually read the NetBSD(R) lists.

bye,
//mirabile
Head Developer, MirOS Project
-- 
I believe no one can invent an algorithm. One just happens to hit upon it
when God enlightens him. Or only God invents algorithms, we merely copy them.
If you don't believe in God, just consider God as Nature if you won't deny
existence.		-- Coywolf Qi Hunt