rosenkra@convex.com (William Rosencranz) (01/17/91)
i will be releasing some enhancements to nroff v1.1p3 in the next week or
so, then will start on v2.0. i know a number of people have told me they
made enhancements, so i'd like to collect them before i start 2.0. please
try to send diffs to v1.1p3, if possible. don't send the entire code. send
to address at bottom of this mail.
what i have done recently, is to create a version (a subset) of less(1)
which reads ANSI/vt100 escapes (e.g. ESC [ 1 m for bold) and changes fonts
while it outputs the file. since i used line A to get the address of the
monospaced fonts, and some of u do not like line A (TT owners, typically),
i thought i'd ask for alternative which do not involve VDI, or "trivially"
involve VDI. note that i am no stranger to AES/VDI, having developed a
60,000+ line application (of which 50,000 lines was AES/VDI code, and
the rest the actual work).
nroff has been modified to generate these escapes (if "-A" switch on cmdline)
for font changes (\fB, \fI, \fR, \fS). the manpager program lets u look at
these files. i had intended for this to replace the PAGER in my man(1)
program, but it can run standalone, too.
manpager basically does this:
1) get ptr to line A struct
2) find DEF_FONT ptr
3) find V_FNT_AD prt
4) replace these ptrs to point into the new font data (char offset
tables remain the same - this is only for monospaced fonts - so
far) at each escape seq
5) after line is printed, reset the old pointers
this is done in less than 50 lines of code, and is solid, and TOS independent
(if the TOS supports line A, that is). i have 8x16 system fonts in manpager
(builtin, not loadable, yet) for bold, underline, "small" (just 8x8 with added
scan lines), and a special char set which adds u/l case greek, box drawing
chars (single and double line), large square/curly braces, math symbols, etc.
is there a better way? don't suggest GDOS since i do not have it.
* * *
mail nroff patches to:
rosenkra@convex.com, or
rosenkra%c1yankee@convex.com, or
...!uunet!convex!c1yankee!rosenkra
-bill
--
Bill Rosenkranz |UUCP: {uunet,texsun}!convex!c1yankee!rosenkra
Convex Computer Corp. |ARPA: rosenkra%c1yankee@convex.com