dw%uw-beaver@utcsrgv (11/30/83)
From: utcsrgv!dw@uw-beaver
We have a Symbolics LGP-1 used mostly for troff output.
We have recently installed Scribe and want to interface it to the LGP.
There seem to be two possibilities:
1) Hack the Scribe font tables to have correct widths for the LGP fonts,
use the existing CAT-4/8 driver in Scribe, and then feed the Scribe
generated cat codes throught the same interface that we are now using
for troff.
2) Pay US$2,500 (I recall) to Unilogic for their LGP driver software.
I would appreciate hearing comments from anyone presently using Scribe/LGP
on the viability/desirability of these two approaches. Please reply
directly to me. If the comments I receive are sufficiently interesting
I will post a summary to this news group.
Dave Wortman
Computer Systems Research Group
University of Toronto
ARPA Net: Wortman@CMU-CS-A
Usenet: {decvax,decwrl,linus,allegra,ihnp4,uw-beaver}!utcsrgv!dwFuruta@WASHINGTON.ARPA@uw-beaver (Furuta@WASHINGTON.ARPA) (11/30/83)
From: Richard Furuta <Furuta@WASHINGTON.ARPA> Hi, We presently use the existing CAT-4/8 driver in Scribe (we use 4 fonts only) and the Symbolics LGP fonts to get Scribe output onto the LGP. We had to do a slight modification of the Symbolics troff stuff to get it to work since Scribe has a different idea of the meaning of the GSI Init command than does troff. It's passable but many people would like more than the 4 faces and there is a strong need for a fixed width face (which isn't provided by Symbolics). All our stuff is available if you'll promise to send back changes. We've not felt the need to spend the ~$2,500 to get it done by Unilogic although what we have isn't perfect (in particular, some of our letter spacing is not quite right). We run a similar arrangement to the Versatec, using modifications of vtroff. When we were setting this software up, we ran up against a bug in the Unix Scribe implementation (but not the Tops-20 one). At the time (and I don't know if this has been fixed) the Unix Scribe GSI driver underlined every character in the document. It was not possible to turn this off or to redefine the underline character. We reported it to Unilogic but I never heard if they responded or not. We therefore disabled underlining which, I suppose, isn't that much of a loss since italic is more appropriate to use. Larry Ruzzo also has a set of macros which are useful for setting simple math in Scribe with our LGP and Versatec implementation. --Rick -------