http://www.berklix.com/~jhs/src/odds/c/unix4dos/nroff/README

A simple small Unix style roff ascii formater. By "Phil J. A. Cockcroft" 
(This Readme by Julian Stacey http://www.berklix.com)

It did Ascii formatting of .rof stuff eg Unix manuals.  It ran under
dos & Unix.  Some files are dated 1994.  du: 110K, doesnt need C++,
Probably would need a little macro faking/ tweaking to format modern
BSD manuals.  Doesnt do things such as Graphical output devices,
for that use instead the much larger groff on FreeBSD.

---------------------
> Subject: groff alternative?
> From: Emanuel Strobl <Emanuel.strobl @ gmx.net>
> Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2005 20:10:41 +0200
> To: freebsd-questions @ freebsd.org, freebsd-current @ freebsd.org

> I'm using NO_CXX in my make.conf to strip down the base system to ~50MB=20
> including man pages. The only problem is that groff is missing if I don't=20
> build c++, and even if I build groff itself and the needed libstdc++ it cos=
> ts=20
> me about 10MB. If I just skip NO_CXX it's only 500k more, so I moved my=20
> patches to /dev/null.
> 
> Now I wrote a port for GNU/groff, but this also consumes 9974k by default a=
> nd=20
> I don't want to include patches into that port to strip down groff, if that=
> =20
> was possible at all.
> 
> Does anybody know any alternative for the groff part to view man pages simp=
> ly=20
> with the man command? It's horrible that the filter needs more space than a=
> ll=20
> the manpages itself!
> 
> And of course, even if I decide to leave system man pages outside the flash=
> =20
> card I still may want to read man pages of installed packages (which is=20
> another mountpoint on my installation, so there may be no space limit,=20
> depending on the card and additional drives)
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> =2DHarry
-----------
From: Thomas Dickey <dickey @ radix.net>
Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2005 14:26:29 -0400 (20:26 CEST)
To: Emanuel Strobl <Emanuel.strobl @ gmx.net>
Cc: freebsd-current @ freebsd.org
Cc: freebsd-questions @ freebsd.org

On Tue, Apr 26, 2005 at 08:10:41PM +0200, Emanuel Strobl wrote:
> 
> Does anybody know any alternative for the groff part to view man pages simply 
> with the man command? It's horrible that the filter needs more space than all 
> the manpages itself!

perhaps "cawf"