rogerc@ncrcae.Columbia.NCR.COM (Roger Collins) (02/25/88)
First, complaints: When I have a table with double rules, only a single rule gets printed on a laser printer. (The single rule is overstriked once.) Also, the vertical lines do not meet exactly with the horizontal lines. Tbl appears to produce output that says go up 1 point; draw single rule; go down 2 points and draw another single, thus producing the double rule. My question: Does nroff even TRY (given a complete /usr/lib/term/* table) to move, vertically or horizontally, points at a time? Apparently not. Another question: Is there a way of defining a printer table for troff like /usr/lib/term/* is to nroff? My goal is to print fancy tables and fonts and stuff on a NCR 6416 laser printer, preferably in the more powerful ISO mode, using tbl/eqn/nroff/troff, and the output look more like a laser printer instead of a dumb line printer. Is anyone doing this? What are my alternatives? Any public domain filters that replace troff? I am running SysV.3. -- Roger Collins NCR - E&M Columbia - TOWER Systems Development Address: rogerc@ncrcae.Columbia.NCR.COM Disclaimer: Everything here is opinion and all opinions expressed here are my own and do not reflect those of my employer or any other person or organization.
gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn ) (02/25/88)
In article <3085@ncrcae.Columbia.NCR.COM> rogerc@ncrcae.UUCP (Roger Collins) writes: >Does nroff even TRY (given a complete /usr/lib/term/* table) to move, >vertically or horizontally, points at a time? Apparently not. "nroff" is intended only for dumb character-oriented devices such as line printers, daisy-wheel printers, and dumb terminals. >Is there a way of defining a printer table for troff like /usr/lib/term/* is >to nroff? Yes, device-independent troff uses the -Tdevname option to locate a description of the intended device. This is generally a compiled binary produced by a utility called "makedev" from a text specification. >My goal is to print fancy tables and fonts and stuff on a NCR 6416 laser >printer, preferably in the more powerful ISO mode, using tbl/eqn/nroff/troff, >and the output look more like a laser printer instead of a dumb line printer. Then forget nroff and use troff. I don't know of any troff support for the NCR 6416. In fact this is the first I've heard of it. We use Imagen and Hewlett-Packard, mostly. (Imagen is much better.)
kg@elan.UUCP (Ken Greer) (02/25/88)
> Does nroff even TRY (given a complete /usr/lib/term/* table) to move, > vertically or horizontally, points at a time? Apparently not. > > Is there a way of defining a printer table for troff like /usr/lib/term/* is > to nroff? > > My goal is to print fancy tables and fonts and stuff on a NCR 6416 laser > printer. 1. Nroff *can* be made to move in units of 1 printer unit. For example, we have a LaserJet driver table for Nroff that moves in 1/300 inch units. Look at the Horz and Vert definitions in your Nroff table. They can be 1 if the other parameters are also so modified. 2. There is a way of defining new printers for ditroff -- but it ain't as simple as building a table. At its easiest, it's about as easy as writing a compiler code generator. Very sketchy documentation may be found in troff(5) and font(5), if you have 'em (from the DWB manual.) 3. Yes, you can print all sorts of fancy fonts on a Laser printer, even with Nroff. Gentle reader, please don't send me freeware requests for our nroff laser printer driver tables. Supporting Nroff/Troff is our *business*. (That is, our only source of income.) We do offer: 1. Nroff 2.0+tbl+lots of driver tables+other goodies for MS-DOS for $99. It's well documented, no less! 2. An enhanced diTroff et. al. with LaserJet+PostScript support from $695 to $4995 on MS-DOS and UNIX systems. -- Ken Greer Elan Computer Group, Inc. 415-322-2450 {ames,hplabs}!elan!kg