laser-lovers@uw-beaver (07/07/85)
From: jqj@Cornell.arpa (J.Q. Johnson) This has been raised before, but I'm still looking for a consensus on troff names for various special characters, e.g. the characters available on the MetaFont Math font. Without such a consensus, there is no guarantee that I can take the troff source file that printed just fine on my Imagen and mail it to my publisher for printing on her high-resolution phototypesetter (unless, of course, I stick to the C/A/T symbols, which I am unwilling to do). The most complete set of names I've seen so far is that recently announced by Lee Moore <Moore.wbst@xerox.arpa> for his ditroff support of Interpress. In addition to being complete, the set makes some effort at being logical; for example, circle-plus is ``a+'' for ``abstract plus.'' Whether or not you like Interpress (hush, Brian), I think you'll agree that some standard is necessary, and I propose this one. The question is whether it will fly. In particular, I am curious what the Adobe transcript package does about special character names in (di)troff. Is there willingness on the part of Adobe to adopt these names as a standard? Do they have an equally complete alternative standard? I am also curious about where support for the (di)troff/Imagen combination comes from these days. We got most of our Imagen software years ago from Lou Salkind; is nyu still the standard distribution point for such software? Finally, of course, there's ATT, which as the distributor of device independent troff is probably the ultimate standardizer of troff. Any comments from the ^G community?