ggray@wpi.wpi.edu (Gary Gray) (04/04/89)
Ok, a number of people have shown their interest in this project, so I will commit myself to it. I hope to have a version running in one or two weeks, with another week to track down bugs and fix bugs, etc. Several people have expressed an interest in making it somewhat nroff compatible (a document formatter, for any non-Unixers) I have looked at the command set for nroff and I am confident that some of the commands can be implemented with little difficulty. I won't attempt to implement hyphenation, or support more of the obscure commands that have limited use in the rather simple buisness of printing a manual (macros, variables, page traps, etc) The Documentor (or whatever I decide to call this thing) will ignore (but remove) any nroff/troff commands it doesn't recognize. In addition, there will be a number of new commands that will be geared towards Apples and manuals. The commands to the program will come in two forms-- the dot command, which is a line that starts with a period and a command name; and the backslash command "\" which can be imbedded in a line. These will be typed in the text file from a normal text processor, so no special editor is needed. Commands will include stuff like indent, set margins, underline, boldface, italics (or other special type forms) reverse and forward paper feed in increments (for sub/superscripts) line centering, paragraph formatting, a special mode to keep figures and diagrams whole, page numbering, headers footers, and tons of other stuff.... The program itself will allow the user to read the text on the screen (with page up, page down, and possibly search capabilities) print the text out to a printer, or dump it to a file and either insert all of the escape codes, or to delete them all (handy if the user wishes to print the file in another manner) Also, there will be the capability to configure the printer codes for each different type style, to interrupt the printout (very handy!!), force a certain page setup (margins, etc) or tell it to ignore certain commands. The user will control such things as the print quality (whether to print in letter quality, if available), page size (and default font size) and to make multiple copies, and other stuff that I haven't had the time to think about... Let me make this real quick: I'm going to implement it in Zbasic, because of the speed that I will be able to develope it at. Can anybody tell me what type of copyright notice I have to include for their libraries? The back of the manual says "no runtime fees", but I assume that they want some sort of boilerplate copyright/disclaimer notice. Can anyone clue me in? Also, since Zbasic has double hires graphics, an 80-col. WYSIWYG preview of the document would not be too hard to impliment with different fonts.... Sorry for the rambling nature of this message... Any and all suggestions, comments, etc. are more than welcome. -- _____________________________________________________________________________ _ | / _ ar \/ ggray@wpi.bitnet | << generic clever and witty saying >> \_| ra / ggray@wpi.wpi.edu |