lamy@ai.toronto.EDU (Jean-Francois Lamy) (08/21/88)
We are trying to make people switch to X11 from Suntools by making them want to switch. The network transparency has most of of them 90%-convinced (our king-kong Sun4s are much faster for many applications) but two sticking points remain. - Under Suntools, programs exist that can be used to associate an arbitrary string to a keyboard key (normally a function key). No such program under X11, even though there are library routines that appear to do something similar. My understanding is that the use of the appropriate lookup function is optional, and therefore things may work in one program and not in another. We tried xmodmap, and even though the tables as printed by xprkbd contain entries for the control characters, there is no way to get R1 on a Sun keyboard to map to a ^T (Yes, I know there is no key that sends that directly on a Sun keyboard). People need to be able to send any control or meta-ified character by hitting a keypad key. Suns and AnnArbor Ambassadors have the same keypad layout; some people have been using a particular keypad configuration for 8 years now!. The thing must work under xterm and gnuemacs, at the very least. Surely someone has run into this before! - The unavailability of a nice, semi-fast public-domain TeX previewer. Dvitool has spoiled them. Dvi2X was not nearly as nice. The VorTeX people are being less than reasonable (to get Dvi2X11 we would have to order a new tape, at 250$, and given that Dvi2X was such a let down we don't feel like it. They don't offer to make it FTP-able to licensed sites, which we feel is downright silly). We have a nice previewer for troff (which I'm told will be on the R3 tape) that uses downloaded fonts. Given that we already have all fonts in TeX pk format at the proper resolution, we were wondering which way to pick to turn xtroff into xtex: a) convert all our pk fonts to bdf and then compressed binary and let the server load them (under the assumption that a properly tuned server could do a faster job of displaying things than we can acheive by building a pixmap and sending it). b) get the server to load pk fonts directly (which of course means that not all implementations could cope with it -- in particular Sun's "official" implementation which we'd hope would be properly tuned to do text). Apologies to all if this has been beaten to death, I'm just joining the local redistribution newsgroup again after a long lapse. Jean-Francois Lamy lamy@ai.utoronto.ca, uunet!ai.utoronto.ca!lamy AI Group, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4