mark@rochester.UUCP (06/14/83)
From: Mark Kahrs <mark> arizona!whm's message brings to mind a caveat that we have "discovered" (uncovered is more like it) when trying to port ditroff to our laser printer. This concerns the use of macro packages (such as ms or me) with troff... It so turns out that both ms and me wire in the fonts 1 thru 4. We were unable to make our macro packages work until we moved the timesroman fonts to positions 1 through 4. Unfortunately, this "inhibits" the use of other fonts with the standard font packages... Furthermore, we found it necessary to name the fonts 1 through 4. Other sites may not have found this necessary, but we certainly have. Now what I'd like to know is WHY ditroff doesn't emit a "w" after a tab! Mark.
eric%UCBARPA%berkeley@sri-unix.UUCP (06/23/83)
-me uses the numeric values for fonts internally because otherwise you cannot load other fonts. For example, if it were to use B for bold font, it would only work if you had Times Roman loaded -- if you wanted to use Hershey, the font change macros would die. I agree that this is a botch, but it seemed that the alternative was worse. eric