forbus@uiucdcsp.CS.UIUC.EDU (01/25/86)
I know your problem well. You'd probably be better off making your translator 100% or, if your PC program allows printer libraries, writing a printer description for whatever printer you really want to drive with it. I use Final Word II (a.k.a. Emacs/Scribe), and have a translator on my Symbolics machine that does 95% of the translation job. Getting that extra 5% is sufficiently painful (even in Lisp!) that I'm going to try making a DVI driver instead -- FWII can drive Applewriters and Laserjets, so it should be able to deal with Imagens. Doing the translation with unix "tools" seems like trying to build a bridge with Elmer's glue and an X-acto knife, if your formatter has any sophisticated commands. I'm afraid we have created a brain-damaged generation of computer science students, for they seem to not see anything wrong with formatting papers using assembly language (i.e., TROFF).