aglew@urbana.mcd.mot.com (Andy-Krazy-Glew) (10/05/89)
What I want: information on how to make TeX produce reasonable ASCII output, w/wo forward and reverse linefeeds or information on any other near-public domain text processing. Background: My home computer is an AT&T UNIX PC, a 3B1. My printer is an Epson RX-80 (yes, not even an FX-80) (Dating back to my first IBM PC compatible). It has an individual pixel selectable graphics mode, but dot density is very low and graphics mode is very slow; reasonable speed is obtainable only using monospace fonts. I wish to be able to proofread papers and other documents that I prepare for school, on my home computer. Final print will be done at school on Postscript laserprinters. My research group mainly uses TeX as our textprocessing language, although troff is a possibility. TeX is almost freely available, and I already have access to a version of TeX that will run on my UNIX PC. However, I do not have a laserprinter, or an output device capable of the resolution TeX seems to expect. Has anyone got (1) an RX-80 version of TeX (using the graphics mode) or (2) an ascii-only version of TeX. Just as nroff is an ascii version of troff, is there an nTeX? I am not very familiar with TeX internals. Writing a DVI-to-ascii translator has been suggested to me, and remains a possibility - if there is already such a beast, I would be interested in knowing about it. But, my limited knowledge of TeX seems to indicate that by the time you have DVI many of the decisions about placing characters, etc., have already been made; ie. DVI assumes high resolution. Seems to me that what I need to do is to change the rules TeX uses when laying out, before producing the DVI (just as nroff uses a related but distinct set of algorithms, compared to troff). With luck there may be enough parameters to tweak in TeX. Still, the transportability of macro packages like LaTeX would concern me. If anyone can tell me of other textprocessing packages that are possibilities, hopefully public domain, I would appreciate it. -- Andy "Krazy" Glew, Motorola MCD, aglew@urbana.mcd.mot.com 1101 E. University, Urbana, IL 61801, USA. {uunet!,}uiucuxc!udc!aglew My opinions are my own; I indicate my company only so that the reader may account for any possible bias I may have towards our products.