tim@cmu-cs-k.ARPA (Tim Maroney) (01/13/85)
I recently snarfed the POW2 text formatter from SIMTEL20. It works fairly well overall, but it has a few deficiencies. Among these are the lack of various fonts support (you can overstrike a whole line, and underline centered text -- whoopee), the treatment of centering as a special command rather than as a justification mode, the lack of variable-space total justification for printers that support it, the lack of a file inclusion command, the lack of three-part titles, and blank lines not causing a paragraph break. I have fixed one of these by adding font support. The command FT,number switches to the font given by the number, in a table of font handling routine addresses. The font handling routines output a single character in the routine's font, and they are printer specific (non-portable). However, so far I have only added this for left justification, the only mode I use; any font changes will result in bad font-character associations in right or total justify mode, and will have no effect in unformatted text (which I'm not really sure is a very bad thing). I would not want to release such a program, but I am also not heavily motivated to fix it in a way I will never use. So does anyone else want to add this? If you are serious about it, and have a weekend to spare, let me know and I'll send you a copy. Perhaps a number of us could work together on adding the other useful features I mentioned as well. POW has the potential to be a very powerful tool; it seems no one has ever gotten around to making it one. -=- Tim Maroney, Carnegie-Mellon University Computation Center ARPA: Tim.Maroney@CMU-CS-K uucp: seismo!cmu-cs-k!tim CompuServe: 74176,1360 audio: shout "Hey, Tim!" "Remember all ye that existence is pure joy; that all the sorrows are but as shadows; they pass & are done; but there is that which remains." Liber AL, II:9.
cem@intelca.UUCP (Chuck McManis) (01/15/85)
Tim, Have you looked into the ROFF4 formatter? It has all of the features
you mentioned plus some. It is on Simtel20 if you want to snarf a copy,
also available on your local BBS (Consult RCPM-057.LST for details,
not available in all areas, not sold in stores) It has the nice feature
of being able to define ones own font (assuming your printer can do
bit mapped graphics) and is quite flexible.
--Chuck
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