dz@mango.ucsb.edu (Daniel James Zerkle) (09/02/89)
I am babysitting a NeXT and my boss wants to do landscape printing of troff text. The NeXT uses a program called ptroff straight out of Adobe's Transcript department. Basically, it's a shell script that runs troff, and pipes the C/A/T output to a program called pscat, which converts the C/A/T to PostScript. Ptroff then pipes that to the printer. Pscat has a standard header file of postscript commands that it tacks onto the top of all the documents. I did some nifty modifications to get ptroff to do its thing in landscape mode (it normally just does portrait, just like most troff derivatives). I modified the header file to include translate and rotate commands at the very end, which will turn the output sideways. I modified the ptroff shell script so that pscat knows that its pages are only 8.5 inches high (troff doesn't say anything about starting pages, as it thinks its printing on continuous film). You put a couple lines in your document like .ll 9i .pl 8.5i The assorted macro packages need their number registers set, of course. This is all very good and almost works, except for one thing: Troff doesn't know it can print text past 7.54 inches on a line. The ms macros will warn whenever PO+LL > 7.54 inches. Any time you attempt to print text past that, all the characters get bunched up and printed on top of each other about 8 inches across the page. Does anybody know a good way to fix this? Perhaps there is some (preferably inexpensive) package from Adobe or whoever that can deal properly with troff and turn it sideways.... | Dan Zerkle home:(805) 968-4683 morning:961-2434 afternoon:687-0110 | | dz@cornu.ucsb.edu dz%cornu@ucsbuxa.bitnet ...ucbvax!hub!cornu!dz | | Snailmail: 6681 Berkshire Terrace #5, Isla Vista, CA 93117 | | Disclaimer: If it's wrong or stupid, pretend I didn't do it. |