Goeke@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA (01/11/85)
Doug Gwyn complained about not having a DEFINITIVE fix for "enter underscore mode," etc. Am I missing the point? The standard table has lots of things wrong when applied to the arbitrary printer. I can set up the '*bdon' string to work for 9th wire underscoring OR double-density printing OR italics; the problem really is that modern dot matrix printers have just tons of options which one wants to fudge into the termtab in an intelligent way. I've sort of arbitrarily started at the bottom of the table and thrown in the codes for (this is an FX-80 approach, folks) pica, elite, condensed, double, underline, etc. It may not be entirely transportable, tis true, but for that we need a STANDARD, not a FIX, which covers a bunch of these things. My investigations of Proportional Printing brought this to my attention in the when I encountered the '*ploton', etc. strings. I'm not quite ready to say it can't be done, but it may well be impossible to get intelligent plotting out of an Epson -- in any of its 6 modes -- with the current situation. It starts with the fact that Epson wants to see all eight bits, and 'nroff' is busy interpreting the eighth itself, and just loves to use the null character for a variety of switches, which is hard to imbed in a C character string. It also needs to know how many positions its going to plot before it starts -- designed by an unemployed FORTRAN hacker, no doubt. PS I'll send my termtab for the Epson to the 2 people who contacted me early next week. I still don't completely understand it, and in any event I need to put together some comments on it. Bob Goeke [ Goeke @ MIT-Multics.ARPA ] MIT Center for Space Research 617-253-1910