apratt@atari.UUCP (Allan Pratt) (01/20/87)
This may be an elementary question, but I sure can't find anything in any documentation available to me: Can I describe other terminals to nroff? Specifically, I want to describe an Epson printer, which is capable of half-linefeeds (down only), italics, underlining, boldface, Pica and Elite (and Compressed, for that matter), etc. I want to give Nroff what amounts to a termcap for my printer. This would include the fact that it does italics and underlining (so Nroff wouldn't have to use backspace-underscore), boldface, and half-line-feeds-forward (so col wouldn't have to do much). I can't post-process the output, because Nroff does nothing for boldface, and doesn't distinguish between the underlines caused by tbl(1) lines and by italics. Has anyone else noticed that the documentation for UL(1) is out of date? UL does more than underline/standout text: it translates the UNIX/ASCII standard reverse linefeeds into terminal upline codes, for one thing... And both it and COL(1) strip unrecognized characters, including any printer sequences I try to insert between passes. Of course, I can rewrite them, but I would rather not. Am I dreaming? Should I be using ditroff? Will ditroff like hearing about a monospaced output device? I have System V on tape only; is there a ditroff for BSD 4.2? Inquisitively, /----------------------------------------------\ | Opinions expressed above do not necessarily | -- Allan Pratt, Atari Corp. | reflect those of Atari Corp. or anyone else. | ...lll-lcc!atari!apratt \----------------------------------------------/
sl@van-bc.UUCP (01/25/87)
In article <524@atari.UUCP> apratt@atari.UUCP (Allan Pratt) writes: >This may be an elementary question, but I sure can't find anything in >any documentation available to me: > >Can I describe other terminals to nroff? Yes, you must create a tabxxx file for it. Specifically you will need the tabgen package recently (re)released to net.sources by Bruce Townsend if you are running sysv. BSD already has the appropriate sources available. >Specifically, I want to describe an Epson printer, which is capable >of half-linefeeds (down only), italics, underlining, boldface, Pica >and Elite (and Compressed, for that matter), etc. > >I want to give Nroff what amounts to a termcap for my printer. This >would include the fact that it does italics and underlining (so Nroff >wouldn't have to use backspace-underscore), boldface, and >half-line-feeds-forward (so col wouldn't have to do much). I can't >post-process the output, because Nroff does nothing for boldface, >and doesn't distinguish between the underlines caused by tbl(1) lines >and by italics. See if you can track down my recent posting to net.sources for an example of an imagewriter nroff file, and various filters to do post processing, and interface with lp. You can tell nroff about italics and boldface. I didn't have italics so used underline. But I shoudn't think it would be to hard to use a post processor to capture it. You can in fact do most of the processing with a post-processor depending on what your requirements are (with the exeption you mentioned). If you have a proportional print you can tell nroff about it the character widths for a decent looking printout. If you cannot track down my posting (net.sources during the first week or so of Jan/87) please let me know. -- Stuart Lynne ihnp4!alberta!ubc-vision!van-bc!sl Vancouver,BC,604-937-7532 Todays feature: Perry Mason Solves the case of the Fenced in Woman, Erle Stanley Gardner, 1972. One of two Perry Mason novels published posthumously. "It was a typical suburban house - except that it had a spanking new barbed wire fence running straight through the middle of it."