Heirloom

If you are a Mac OS X user and in search of traditional Unix utilities implementation, then you need to check out Heirloom. It is a port of the heirloom tools and supports the users' default encoding, such as en_US.ISO8859-1. The Heirloom Project has provided classic implementations of standard Unix utilities, which were derived from original Unix material released as Open Source by Caldera and Sun.

Heirloom interfaces follow traditional practice and remain generally compatible with System V. However, sometimes extensions that have become common use over the course of time are provided. Also, most utilities are included in a variant that aims at POSIX conformance. Another crucial feature of Heirloom is its ability to switch the encoding on the fly by setting the environment variable 'HEIRLOOMENC'. This allows you to work with different encodings at the same time.

Notably, for more details about switching encoding, you can check $HEIRLOOM/5bin/5 and $HEIRLOOM/etc/5.rc. Heirlooms troff typesetter also supports a broad range of UTF-8 glyphs and Truetype/Opentype fonts. Concerning fonts, there are several tools available to convert the standard Mac fonts into TTF format. After conversion, you can place them into /usr/local/share/fonts/TTF.

For European users, Heirloom comes with unique feature - troff implementation of the '.mediasize a4' request. This implementation enables European users to generate DIN A4 pages instead of the default US letter. In conclusion, Heirloom is a great tool to use for traditional Unix utilities implementation without hassles.