ol@CERISI.CERISI.FR (Lecarme Olivier) (09/14/90)
I implemented a text-processor in Icon. From something extremely simple, capable of only some "natural" pretty-printing, it grown to multiple features including indexes, several tables of contents, running headings, floating figures, macros and so on. It has some unusual characteristics, for example hyphenating algorithms for both English and French, simple handling of French diacritics, and "natural" heuristics for finding good page breaks. But it suffers form severe weaknesses presently: 1) it was designed with an Epson LQ printer in mind, and turning it to generate dvi or Postscript instead would be a major effort (although it would be easy for another line printer); 2) its growth was not planned in advance, and the last features added use holes in the coding design; 3) programming it was done in the same manner, and a complete rewriting would be neeeded for improving performances; 4) its documentation is written in French! It could be made available, along with its documentation, in a rather short time, but only on an "as-is" basis, of course. It presently amounts to about 2500 lines of moderately commented Icon code. Olivier Lecarme