pwh@BOA.GATECH.EDU (Phil Hutto) (06/11/88)
Is there anything available which converts from the dvi produced by ditroff
and friends to TeX dvi? We wish to print departmental technical reports on
our big, fast Xerox printers but they are only set up to print TeX using
the filter x9700. Is there anything we can do about the few diehards that
are still producing their reports using ditroff?
I have heard about 'source' translators that go from troff to TeX...I've heard
mostly that they are pretty bad. Shouldn't this be easier to do at the
intermediate language (dvi) level?
Thanks.
phil
Phil Hutto School of Info and Computer Science, Georgia Tech, Atlanta GA 30332
Freelance Distributed Theoretician O_o
internet pwh@boa.gatech.edu =( )= Ack!
uucp {ihnp4,decvax,ulysses}!gatech!boa!pwh Uken@CS.ROCHESTER.EDU (Ken Yap) (06/29/88)
|Is there anything available which converts from the dvi produced by ditroff |and friends to TeX dvi? We wish to print departmental technical reports on |our big, fast Xerox printers but they are only set up to print TeX using |the filter x9700. Is there anything we can do about the few diehards that |are still producing their reports using ditroff? See my posting "ditdvi" in your nearest comp.sources.misc archive. You make up a virtual dvi printer for ditroff. Ken
mackay@JUNE.CS.WASHINGTON.EDU (Pierre MacKay) (06/30/88)
ditroff output is basically a human-readable version of the machine input to the C/A/T typesetter, and therefore limits itself to the resolution achievable by that film-font machine. dvi output addresses an impossibly accurate typesetter with a resolution to a distance slightly less than the wavelength of visible light. You can round dvi down to the relatively crude resolution of ditroff, but you cannot reliably go the other way. There are other incompatibilities as well, but they could be got around. Even the resolution could be faked up by a simple multiplication, but who would want to. The effect would be to produce a specious appearance of precise resolution in the translated file, which would then be rounded down again to correspond with the resolution of a real world typesetter. It is a good bet that the inaccuracies introduced would noticeably degrade the appearance of the page. dvi-to-ditroff would be more satisfactory, but again, it would be an odd thing to do, since it would introduce two stages of round-off (ditroff is hardly ever sent to a C/A/T these days) where one is trouble enough. Email: mackay@june.cs.washington.edu Pierre A. MacKay Smail: Northwest Computing Support Group TUG Site Coordinator for Lewis Hall, Mail Stop DW10 Unix-flavored TeX University of Washington Seattle, WA 98195 (206) 543-6259