bin@rhesus.primate.wisc.edu (Brain in Neutral) (11/24/87)
Problem 1. I'm on a VAX running Ultrix 1.2. We use Image Network's xroff to do troff documents on a Xerox 2700 II. Many of us are quite pleased with it, including myself. One thing that I'm not particularly happy about is that the fonts seem to have been tuned for a write-black engine, although the Xerox has a write-white engine; characters look a little washed out. Problem 2. I have recently brought up TeX/Metafont and have dvi filters for generating PostScript (for an Apple LaserWriter) or Xerox-style output. Although the Xerox engine is write-white, the LaserWriter engine is write-black, thus for standard dvi conversion I would really need to keep around two sets of TeX font files, in order to make TeX output look right on each machine. I do NOT want to do this. (I already have several megabytes worth of font files for xroff.) Solution? It occurs to me that I could solve some of my problems as follows. (1) Use the standard set of TeX fonts (i.e., the write-black fonts) for writing TeX output to the LaserWriter. (2) use Metafont to generate write-white fonts and coerce the output into xroff format, to fix the xroff fonts. (3) Use a dvi filter to convert TeX output to Xerox format , but have it read the xroff font files rather than the write-black TeX font files. Then I wouldn't need two sets of TeX fonts. TeX ---------+ xroff | | | V V V TeX write -> LW dvi Xerox dvi <- xroff -> Xerox black fonts driver driver fonts xroff | | driver V | | Laser +-------> Xerox <----+ Writer 2700 Has anybody done something even vaguely similar to this? (...he asks, hoping without hope in his heart...) If so, I'd like to hear from you. The TeX situation aside, I'd still like to fix the xroff fonts, or have a general mechanism for converting Metafont output to a form usable by xroff, so I'm especially interested in (2), above. --- Paul DuBois UUCP: {allegra,ihnp4,seismo}!uwvax!rhesus!dubois | ARPA: dubois@rhesus.primate.wisc.edu --+-- | "Live by the sword, die by the sword." | s/the sword/promiscuity/g