
There seems to be a lot of interest lately in scripts and aliases to
make life with nroff, troff, ditroff, eqn, tbl, etc. more bearable.
Here at Cognos, we use "ptroff" from Adobe for typesetting.  Like
everybody else, trying to remember the proper sequence of commands to
format a document is a problem for us too!

So, here's my contribution to a solution.  It's called "roff" (original,
eh!) and it has some nice features.  For one, it can figure out which
macro package to use based on the file name.  And, the rules can easily 
be changed to accomodate your own naming conventions.

Another feature of roff is that it provides the correct pre- and
post-processing by tbl, eqn, col or colcrt when necessary.  Again, this
is mostly based on file naming conventions.  When printed output is
requested, ptroff is used instead of nroff and eqn is used instead of
neqn.  When terminal output is requested, the output is delivered to
"more", or to the pager specified in the environment variable $PAGER.
Post-processing by "colcrt" is done first if pre-processing by tbl or
eqn was performed.

Installation should be pretty straightforward.  I've even included a
makefile.  Since we have our own macro package called "mcognos" (an
extension to "ms") you will probably want to edit the script file and
the man page to change "mcognos" to your favorite local macro package.
("mcognos" is used whenever roff can't decide on something else.)
You might also want to modify the filename patterns if you follow a
different naming convention than we do.

One word of caution:  some of the string literals in the roff script
have leading or trailing spaces.  DON'T REMOVE THEM.  They are necessary
for the variable "cmd" to be expanded properly.

