[net.text] 4.2bsd Spooling/ nroff/ Diablo printers

neisen@umn-cs.UUCP (Joel Neisen) (03/29/84)

We have recently acquired a Diablo terminal, and are trying to
use it on the 4.2 spooling system.  Most of the
time everything works just fine.  However, when
we use the -T450 option in 'nroff', nroff
will use the ECS-LF to do negative line feeds, and generate
CR-LF for new lines.

The problem is that when the tty port is in CRMOD, the header and
stuff from print work just fine.  But the tty driver converts
ESC-LF to ECS-CR-LF, which is not what we want.

However, when we do not use CRMOD, then the header, and non-nroff'ed
things get messed up.

Surely other sites must have encountered the same problem, Diablo
is after all a fairly popular terminal.  I could
change tab450.c in nroff, and create a new
spooler filter to handle nroff output differently,
but I find it hard to believe that the distributed source
will not work as is.  Has anyone else already solved this problem ??

If so I sure would appreciate any information.
Thanks in advance.

	Joel Neisen
	DICOMED Corp.

	..we13!dicomed!joel
	..ihnp4!stolaf!umn-cs!dicomed!joel

henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (04/01/84)

The problem is that for many printers, the 450-likes included, nroff
wants to talk *directly* to the terminal so that it can do ioctls to
turn things like CRMOD on and off.  The code as distributed works,
but by trying to run it through a spooler you are breaking it.  The
simplest solution is to change tab450.c so that a reverse linefeed is
done by two reverse half-line motions in sequence, which eliminates
the problem with a newline appearing in the middle of a magic sequence
and thus eliminates the need to fiddle with CRMOD.
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry