joefritz@pawl.rpi.edu (Jochen M. Fritz) (12/01/89)
A lot of the software available on the net has the manuals
improperlly formatted for viewing on MSDOS. The reason for this is
that they use line feeds instead of returns. I wrote a program that will
convert these lf into cr's. If anyone is getting text that doesn't line
up, then this program is for you. If you want a copy, please contact me
through E-mail. If I get enough responses, I will send it to c.b.i.p.
This is public domain software with Turbo C source code.
name: Jochen Fritz
Internet: joefritz@pawl.rpi.edu
bitnet: gk2s@rpitsmts heiby@falkor.UUCP (Ron Heiby) (12/03/89)
This reminds me of one of my pet peeves. At home, on my PC, I have a (approx) ten year old Epson MX-100. At work (on my UNIX box), I have an NEC "laser" printer for just text and another that does Postscript, HP, etc. I prefer printing program documentation on the NEC at work. I can easily handle the CR/LF to LF conversion when I send the doc'n file to my UNIX box. What is a royal P.I.T.A. is when people have distributed their documentation files that make ASSUMPTIONS about the kind of printer I have. Frequently, the assumption is that the printer has 66 lines per page. My NEC has 63. Just the other day, I got ahold of the new version of CDISK. Looks pretty neat, but I had to go into my text editor and replace the three blank lines at the "end/beginning" of each page to a formfeed and delete the repetitious copyright notice from the bottom of each page. (I left it on the first page, to do the right thing. The only bad effect there was that "Page 1" appeared by itself on an otherwise blank piece of paper.) What really ticks me off is folks who actually assume that I have an Epson by including various escape sequences. The worst offender that I can recall was a version of "dx" I tried a year or two ago. I was *forced* to print it on my Epson with the crummy paper I have for my data analysis. To top it off, the archive was corrupt on the doc'n file, so printing it got out of sync with where the top of form *really* was. Who knows, maybe if printing the manual hadn't been such a *pain*, maybe I would have ended up liking "dx" enough to keep using it and register it. I *do* think that having each page of a software package's manual contain a page number is a good thing, especially if there's a table of contents and/or index. (It there isn't, what's the point?) Maybe documentation with the program could be restricted to text, space, tab, and formfeed, with no more than about 60 lines of text per page, formfeed at the end. That ought to satisfy just about *any* wierd printer out there. Save the fancy, incompatible stuff for the hard copy that gets sent out when the user actually registers the program (if shareware). Thanks for reading the preceding bitch. Have a pleasant day. -- Ron Heiby, heiby@chg.mcd.mot.com Moderator: comp.newprod "Life is indeed an inexplicable sequence of imponderable surprises."