[Groff] Mac 10.2/groff 1.17.2/eqn

[Duncan Agnew]

I have been a happy user of troff/groff since 1978, on a succession of
machines--for a lot of scientific typesetting, so I am a heavy eqn user.
But I have encountered a problem on the Mac, with OS 10.2, which comes with
groff pre-installed. Files with no equations work just fine. As a sample
file with equations, I took the (now-available) source for Unix Text
Processing, chapter 9. (Many thanks to those who made this available).

On my HPUX workstation running 1.15 I get

% groff -pet -mgs ch09.t > tmp.ps
ch09.t:12: warning: number register `Ref' not defined
ch09.t:362: warning: can't find special character `dq'

and the output looks basically OK.


On the Mac running 1.17.2 I get

% groff -pet -ms ch09.t > tmp.ps
ch09.t:11: warning: number register `Ref' not defined
ch09.t:88: warning: can't break line
ch09.t:88: warning: can't break line
ch09.t:88: warning: can't break line
ch09.t:88: warning: can't break line
ch09.t:88: warning: can't break line
ch09.t:88: warning: can't break line
ch09.t:88: warning: can't break line
ch09.t:88: warning: can't break line
ch09.t:88: warning: can't break line
        ...... [about another 50 lines of these]
ch09.t:1696: warning: can't break line
ch09.t:1698: warning: can't break line
ch09.t:1703: warning: can't break line
ch09.t:1712: warning: can't break line

and the equations are a mess: missing, or with lines across the page.
Just running eqn produces no error messages. I have not tried to
take the eqn output from 1.17.2 and run it through gtroff 1.15, since the
output from eqn 1.17.2 and eqn 1.15 are not the same, although similar.

Has anyone else encountered this? What is a possible fix?

Duncan Agnew
address@hidden