herndon@sctc.com (William R. Herndon) (03/01/90)
Our organization has just purchased a number of NCD 19 X-Terminals,
and we are having a number of problems with them, one of which is
that our version of texx fails to display anything in its window.
All that shows up is the "spraycan" cursor. No text or page seperator
appears.
From what I have seen of the source code of texx there are two ways in
which fonts can be used by texx. ( Please forgive me if my understanding
or terminology are incorrect. ) The first option is to have a utility
supplied in the distribution convert the TeX fonts to a set of fonts,
in SNF format I guess, at the resolution that is to be displayed ( 85dpi
in the case of our SUN workstations ). This option supposedly produces
better text. I don't know since we use the other option, which I think
takes the TeX fonts converts them internally and then scales them to the
proper point size.
Anyway here are some of the options that we have explored in order to
solve this problem:
1. On the assumption that texx used a set of fonts not available to the
NCD servers, we attempted to locate and add such fonts to the server's
internal tables. No such luck. We couldn't find any such fonts,
found no evidence of the SUN servers loading the fonts, and don't
believe that such fonts are even used by texx since the documentation
seems to indicate that texx generates the displayed pages as complete
bitmaps.
2. We called NCD and were told that the program is probably displaying
white text on white background. They suggested inverting the
display window ( specifically they said that we should set the
ReverseVideo resource for all texx clients ). Well, trying reverse
video did exactly what I thought it would do, produced black text
on black background ( assuming of course that this was the problem
in the first place ).
3. We explored the possibility that the texx clients might have problems
displaying window contents on remote server's, but found that it
is not a problem when the remote server connected to is driving a
SUN display.
So, I'm out of ideas. Anyone else out there encountered a similar
problem? Could there be a problem with a program that thinks it's is
generating bitmaps for an 85dpi display ( SUN ) attempting to display
them on a 100dpi display ( NCD19 )?
Any and all help is appreciated.
- Max
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William R. Herndon herndon@sctc.com
Secure Computing Technology Corp. 1210 W. County Road E #100
Arden Hills, Mn. 55112
(612) 482-4731
The opinions expressed are solely those of the author. Any resemblance
to other opinions, either living or dead, is purely coincidental.