[comp.soft-sys.andrew] Andrew to text format -- help?

nsb@THUMPER.BELLCORE.COM (Nathaniel Borenstein) (06/20/91)

(This is sort of halfway between an Andrew and an nroff question, but I
think it is of interest to Andrew users in general.)

I've recently had need to convert an Andrew-format document to a plain
text file for people to read all over the Internet, and the results are
still slightly glitchy.  I've figured out 2/3 of what I did wrong, but
would like advice on the last point.

First of all, I chose not to use the "ezview" program to simply strip
out all formatting, the way the mail system does, because I wanted to
end up with pagination, numbered page headings, table of contents, etc. 
So instead, I did the following:

ezprint -c -t $1 | nroff -Tlpr

The addition of the "-Tlpr" took care of most of my problems in the
first pass, such as embedded escape characters and weird page lengths. 
However, I am left with one undesirable oddity:  several things are
underlined with the ^H_ convention, which is not what I would consider
plain text.  Does anyone know how to tell nroff not to do this?  Thanks
in advance.  -- Nathaniel

nsb@THUMPER.BELLCORE.COM (Nathaniel Borenstein) (06/20/91)

Thanks to all who responded.  I'm currently using the following command
which seems to do the trick:

ezprint -c -t my-file-name | nroff  -Tlpr | sed -e 1,\$s/_//g

Not entirely beautiful, but it the results look very nice!

nsb@THUMPER.BELLCORE.COM (Nathaniel Borenstein) (06/24/91)

Thanks, col is indeed the right thing to use.  -- NB