pcolsen@super.ORG (Peter C Olsen) (10/09/89)
Two recent articles (<9772@chinet.chi.il.us> les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) and <2894NU013809@NDSUVM1> NU013809@NDSUVM1.BITNET (Greg Wettstein) discuss a problem in formatting pages and suggest that it might be due to using an EPSON dvi driver with a Gemini printer. I once had the same symptons and determined the same cause. The EPSON uses a minimum line feed of 1/216 inches, the older Gemini printers (for example, the Star 10 and the Radix 10, which I once had) used 1/144 inch. I solved my problem by writing a little filter which scanned the .dvi file and rescaled all the line feed sequences to the nearest common length. Most of the other codes are the same, so that all that is necessary is to find the escape code for "advance this many 1/216ths of an inch" and scale the following number so that it will advance the right number of "1/144ths". The escape seequence is "<ESC>Jn" where n is the number which must be scaled. Note that this will get the long "\vspace" runs nearly right, but that text lines may still be mal-formed. This is because some dvi drivers for 9-pin printers space one minimum linefeed and then print the next raster line. In this case, substituting 1/144 for 1/216 will yield a noticable deformity. One solution to this problem might be to construct new fonts --- mine was to buy a new printer.