wallen@NPRDC.ARPA (Mark Wallen) (11/20/85)
I've encountered what I think is a bug somewhere in the troff - pscat - LaserWriter chain. Specifically, sometimes (and that means not everytime) lines drawn in troff with the \l and \L functions don't come out in the correct place on the page. I thought I had the answer when I saw an article in this forum by Jim Bailey (...!tektronix!tekcrl!jimb) on problems with tbl's box option. However, as I read on I realized that this was a ditroff fix not a troff one. Moreover, tables seem to come out fine. The symptoms are: a box drawn with the following (in a macro) \L'\\$2'\l'3i\(ul'\L'-\\$2'\l'-3i\(ul' .sp \\$2 .sp (\\$2 is the second parameter to the macro) seems to lose the bottom horizontal line (the first \l'3i\(ul'). Everything else comes where it should. The popular place for the bottom line is under the first line of text that follows this figure, but I have also seen it appear way above the figure! The other symptom is with "crop marks". These are very short line segments that mark the four corners of the page. Often these work just dandy, but other times they don't appear on the page at all, and then some subsequent page will get several sets of the crop marks smashed all over it. Has anyone else observed this? I'm not sure where to look for the fault, though I do know that the same troff and macros package produce correct output (at least, it's what I thought it should do) on a Symbolics laser printer. Any help would be most appreciated. Mark Wallen UC San Diego wallen@nprdc.arpa ucbvax!sdcsvax!sdcsla!wallen.uucp