reneni@psy.vu.nl (Rene Nieuwboer) (07/18/90)
Hi There, Has anyone converted Ditroff for the HP-Laserjet III printer? Especially the font tables with their character widths are giving me headaches. The postprocessor will not be too difficult. If it has to be paid for, please don't be ashamed to mention it! Thanks in advance. /* Rene Nieuwboer, Computersection Psychology, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Holland. (InterEunet: reneni@psy.vu.nl) */
cs002@unocss.unomaha.edu (cs002) (07/20/90)
In article <1210@wundt.psy.vu.nl>, reneni@psy.vu.nl (Rene Nieuwboer) writes: > > Has anyone converted Ditroff for the HP-Laserjet III printer? > Especially the font tables with their character widths are giving > me headaches. The postprocessor will not be too difficult. > If it has to be paid for, please don't be ashamed to mention it! > As you mention, the postprocessor is not the problem -- anything that drives a LaserJet II will work. By ``font tables'', I presume you mean the problem of actually obtaining the font widths for the ``internal'' fonts - CG Times and CG Univers 1 and their italic, bold, and bold italic counterparts. These can be obtained using Type Director 2.0, available from HP for less than $50 US. Actually, Type Director produces font support files for a variety of products, including Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, and Ventura Publisher. If you know the format of the font support files for these products, and how they are interpreted, then you can, indeed, ``divine'' the font widths for the internal fonts. Alas, it's still a pain. What is more productive is the use of the TFM files that Type Director will generate for ``AutoFont'' support. These are *NOT* the TFM files used with TeX (as I found out the hard way). Instead, they are ``Tagged Font Metric'' files. As I am working on a ditroff (to be publicly availble) specifically for the MS-DOS and OS/2 environment, and specifically wanted to eliminate as much of the hassle with font widths as possible, I investigated and found that HP provides developers with a package of info on TFM files, including two floppies with C code and sample TFM files. I will be shortly producing a program which will generate ditroff font tables from TFM files, and at that time will post it to some appropriate newsgroup. If in the meantime you really need to investigate further on your own, I suggest either acquiring Type Director, or the TFM package from HP, or both. Stan Wileman, Math/CS, U. of Nebraska at Omaha, Omaha, NE 68182-0243 cs002@unocss.unomaha.edu -or- stanw@zeus.unomaha.edu
clewis@eci386.uucp (Chris Lewis) (07/26/90)
In article <3028@unocss.unomaha.edu> cs002@unocss.unomaha.edu (cs002) writes: > In article <1210@wundt.psy.vu.nl>, reneni@psy.vu.nl (Rene Nieuwboer) writes: > > Has anyone converted Ditroff for the HP-Laserjet III printer? > > Especially the font tables with their character widths are giving > > me headaches. The postprocessor will not be too difficult. > > If it has to be paid for, please don't be ashamed to mention it! > As you mention, the postprocessor is not the problem -- anything that > drives a LaserJet II will work. Eg: jetroff. (or psroff if you only have CAT troff instead of ditroff) > By ``font tables'', I presume you mean the problem of actually obtaining > the font widths for the ``internal'' fonts - CG Times and CG Univers 1 > and their italic, bold, and bold italic counterparts. These can be obtained > using Type Director 2.0, available from HP for less than $50 US. Actually, > Type Director produces font support files for a variety of products, including > Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, and Ventura Publisher. If you know the format of > the font support files for these products, and how they are interpreted, then > you can, indeed, ``divine'' the font widths for the internal fonts. Alas, it's > still a pain. Having had to hand-tweak CAT Troff width tables in such situations, it doesn't take that long to make acceptable width tables by hand. A day (perhaps) to tune 8 fonts. BTW: psroff 2.0 (in comp.sources.unix very soon) has a number of utility programs that might be of use in such situations: - generate ditroff-like width tables from TeX PK's and HP SFP's. - Merge PK's into useable HP SFP's. - Dump PK and SFP characteristics. - font displayers. - etc. (Psroff 2.0 is a backend to CAT troff that can translate into Postscript, HPLJ (with incremental font downloads of SFP's or PK's) or ditroff). Does the III autoscale downloaded fonts too? (Haven't seen any LJIII docs yet) -- Chris Lewis, Elegant Communications Inc, {uunet!attcan,utzoo}!lsuc!eci386!clewis Ferret mailing list: eci386!ferret-list, psroff mailing list: eci386!psroff-list
cs002@unocss.unomaha.edu (cs002) (07/29/90)
In article <1990Jul26.163727.25454@eci386.uucp>, clewis@eci386.uucp (Chris Lewis) writes: > In article <3028@unocss.unomaha.edu> cs002@unocss.unomaha.edu (cs002) writes: > Does the III autoscale downloaded fonts too? (Haven't seen any LJIII > docs yet) > -- The LaserJet III will scale downloadable fonts, IF they are scalable down- loadable fonts (sounds like doublespeak, doesn't it). LJ IIIs deal with two kinds of fonts - bitmapped and scalable. Internally its got several scalable fonts, from 0.25 point to 999.75 point in quarter- point increments. They can be used in landscape or portrait, since it'll do rotation. Externally (downloadable) you can have bitmapped or scalable fonts. The bitmapped fonts can't be scaled by the printer, but the scalable guys can. Sorta makes sense. The scalable fonts have all sorts of special info about how to do scaling, and they're significantly more complex than bitmapped fonts. Documentation on the format of these things is available from CompuGraphic - I've not yet sent for it. BTW, I've acquired the HP PostScript cartridge for the LJ III and everything I've tested works just the way I've expected. I'm no PS guru, so there may likely be some problems that I've not discovered. One unfortunate problem is that when the PS cartridge is installed in the printer, PCL goes away. This means you can't have a MAC and traditional PCL applications on a PC use the same printer without powering down, inserting or removing the cartridge, and powering up again. For many this won't be a problem, but for our site, where we have PCs, MACs, and a Sequent all generating print files (fortunately not all for one lonely LJ III) it means more manual intervention. Stan Wileman, Math/CS Dept., U. of Nebraska at Omaha, Omaha NE 68182-0243 cs002@unocss.unomaha.edu -or- stanw@zeus.unomaha.edu