russ@wpg.UUCP (Russell Lawrence) (09/30/87)
I have been trying to implement proportional space printing using nroff and a fully equipped Diablo 630. I reworked the nroff driver tables so that nroff would send a string to turn on the Diablo's built-in circuits for performing PS printing and justified right margins. The output, however, was not satisfactory. After turning off the right margin justification, I realized that nroff was wrapping some lines as much as an inch and a half away from the margin because it was, of course, still assuming constant-width characters. This forced the Diablo to insert so much blank padding that some l i n e s looked truly ridiculous! At that point, I decided to write my own crude formatter with builtin character width tables, but quickly gave up when I decided that hyphenation would require programming time/talent/brains far exceeding what I could bring to bear on the task. After looking for another formatter, I came across a public domain version of nroff, but it turned out to be MS-DOS specific. I realized that this question has probably been posed several hundred times, but my company has only been on the net for about a month. Any email suggestions, comments, or pointers about implementing PS (proportional space) printing with [nt]roff, or similar packages would be greatly appreciated. Barring that, how about some tips (or PD sources) for handling hyphenation? -- Russell Lawrence (Too poor to buy a laser) WP Group POB 306, Metairie, LA 70004 AT&T: +1 504 456 0001 UUCP: !uunet!wpg!russ COMPUSERVE: 72337,3261
kathy@bakerst.UUCP (10/01/87)
In article <167@wpg.UUCP> russ@wpg.UUCP (Russell Lawrence) writes: >I have been trying to implement proportional space printing using nroff >and a fully equipped Diablo 630. When you nroff, are you nroffing with the -T630 option? Kathy Vincent ------> Home: {ihnp4|mtune|codas|ptsfa}!bakerst!kathy ------> AT&T: {ihnp4|mtune|burl}!wrcola!kathy
henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (10/01/87)
> ... I reworked the nroff driver tables so > that nroff would send a string to turn on the Diablo's built-in circuits > for performing PS printing... it was, of course, still > assuming constant-width characters... Um, has it escaped your attention that an nroff driver table includes a width table, and nroff is fairly willing to deal with characters that are not all the same width? (I do recall some bugs down in the fine points, but the basic logic works.) -- "There's a lot more to do in space | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology than sending people to Mars." --Bova | {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,utai}!utzoo!henry
gwyn@brl-smoke.UUCP (10/04/87)
In article <939@bakerst.UUCP> kathy@bakerst.UUCP (Kathy Vincent) writes: -In article <167@wpg.UUCP> russ@wpg.UUCP (Russell Lawrence) writes: ->I have been trying to implement proportional space printing using nroff ->and a fully equipped Diablo 630. -When you nroff, are you nroffing with the -T630 option? Ack! This conflicts with the new AT&T 630 terminal! Use -T450 (or -T450-12) for all Diablo HyType II compatible printers.
ado@elsie.UUCP (Arthur David Olson) (10/05/87)
> ->I have been trying to implement proportional space printing using nroff > ->and a fully equipped Diablo 630. > -When you nroff, are you nroffing with the -T630 option? > > Ack! This conflicts with the new AT&T 630 terminal! > Use -T450 (or -T450-12) for all Diablo HyType II compatible printers. What should be used for the (poorly named, given the existence of the Diable device) AT&T 630? -- ado@vax2.nlm.nih.gov ADO, VAX, and NIH are trademarks of Ampex and DEC.
gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn ) (10/06/87)
In article <7512@elsie.UUCP> ado@elsie.UUCP (Arthur David Olson) writes:
-> -When you nroff, are you nroffing with the -T630 option?
-> Ack! This conflicts with the new AT&T 630 terminal!
-> Use -T450 (or -T450-12) for all Diablo HyType II compatible printers.
-What should be used for the (poorly named, given the existence of the
-Diable device) AT&T 630?
Actually, "troff | proof".
If you really want to use nroff, though, use "nroff -Tlp" the same as
for most softcopy terminals.