laser-lovers@uw-beaver (laser-lovers) (11/17/84)
From: Kevin Smallwood <kcs@PURDUE.ARPA> This is the first time I have submitted to this group, so please be kind. We, in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University, have a Symbolics Laser Printer that we purchased back in February of 1982 (at least that is when it FINALLY arrived!). Since then, we have been fighting a losing battle of trying to do some serious typesetting on it. We tend to run troff and DITroff on it. The main problems that I have seen is in the font files. I believe the only fonts that we have are those that were provided with the Symbolics back in 1982. This is a very limited set of font types (just R, I, B, and S). Furthermore, these fonts seem to be very poor formed. I believe that Symbolics just took Versatec fonts (200 dpi) and tweeked them for the laser printer (240 dpi). Now, realize that we just have the laser printer for a non-Symbolics host (ie, we hang it off of our VAX 11/780 running UN*X 4.2BSD, and not a Symbolics Lisp Machine). It seems that since about a year ago, Symbolics REFUSES to service or even listen to us since we do not have this hanging off of their Lisp Engine. What I was wondering is how many other users had/have this problem, and what can be done to make life a little easier as far as typesetting? Are other fonts available (even for $$) for the Symbolics-LGP? Do other users have as much trouble as we seem to be having getting Symbolics to respond to their problems? Is everyone out there laughing at us buying a Symbolics-LGP instead of the Imagin Imprint-10 (at least at the time that we made the purchase)? Thanks for ANY pointers you can supply. Most of the problems I see are in using Eqn with DITroff. BTW, we do run a little TeX, which is much better, but most of the users/secretaries only know troff, and their papers (publish or perish!) are already done in troff; so, please do not suggest that everyone learn TeX. Sorry is this is a little vague, but I need to start somewhere. Kevin Smallwood Systems Programmer kcs@Purdue ----------