druid@uk.co.gec-avionics.tsrl (Mark D Templeton - Senior Systems Engineer - TSRL - GEC Avionics) (05/17/91)
In general, for really swish documents, I use TEX for the text, with xfig for the documentation. Having become truly impressed with Andrew, I would prefer to use it. However I can see no way to import xfig figures into Andrew---a great shame. xfig can produce PostScript or FIG format files. Please take my wish list below as "it's great, but these would make it even better", rather than a winge list. Wish list, in descending order of desirablility 1. Ability to import PostScript. At the moment it can only be exported, not imported. Most decent graphic tools can output PostScript, thus usefulness of the ez suite would be improved. 2. TeX output rather than *roff output. This would make Andrew usable on machines where the cost of the Programmers' Workbench is hard to justify. It would also improve the look of text output. 3. A special character card in ez to allow easy insertion of, say, the four different types of dash [m-dash, n-dash, hyphen and minus], double open quotes, double close quotes, etc. 4. Support for Silicon Graphics machines, especially 310 series. Also support for SCO Unix-386. These are just personal greed!! Thanks for listening. Regards and thanks, Mark.
bill@allegra.att.com (Bill Schell) (05/18/91)
Has anyone thought of taking ghostscript and putting an ATK object wrapper around it to construct a postscript display object? It shouldn't be too hard, given that ghostscript will output bitmaps given postscript input. Ghostscript is free too and from the limited use I've given it seems pretty solid. Bill Schell AT&T Bell Labs, Murray Hill, NJ bill@allegra.att.com
gk5g+@ANDREW.CMU.EDU (Gary Keim) (05/18/91)
Excerpts from misc: 17-May-91 Importing PostScript Mark -@uk.co.gec-avionic (1205+0) > 1. Ability to import PostScript. > At the moment it can only be exported, not imported. Most decent graphic > tools can output PostScript, thus usefulness of the ez suite would be > improved. Agreed. Excerpts from misc: 17-May-91 Importing PostScript Mark -@uk.co.gec-avionic (1205+0) > 3. A special character card in ez to allow easy insertion of, say, the > four different types of dash [m-dash, n-dash, hyphen and minus], double > open quotes, double close quotes, etc. I'm not sure whether your sources include this , but there is a program called compchar that will allow you to do this. Try: % help compchar Excerpts from misc: 17-May-91 Importing PostScript Mark -@uk.co.gec-avionic (1205+0) > Also support for SCO Unix-386. This is coming in the next patch (we're in beta test right now). Thanks for the input. Keep it up. Gary Keim ATK Group
dd26+@ANDREW.CMU.EDU ("Douglas F. DeJulio") (05/18/91)
> 2. TeX output rather than *roff output. > This would make Andrew usable on machines where the cost of the > Programmers' Workbench is hard to justify. It would also improve the > look of text output. I'd rather not see this. If you can't use troff, what about groff? It's free. It'll even output TeX-dvi files with the computer modern font, so if you think CM looks good then there's an instant way to improve the look of text right now. It also outputs raw PostScript directly if you ask it nicely. -- Doug DeJulio dd26+@andrew.cmu.edu
ggm@brolga.cc.uq.oz.au (George Michaelson) (05/18/91)
henke@qt.ipa.fhg.de (Juergen Henke) writes: >I agree with the use of groff, but did YOU try this ? >I don't have ditroff (i even don't know were to get it ...:-) and >have till now no big success in printing with groff - text prints fine, but >(at the moment) it will print only 1 (one) zip in addition to the text, and >no raster at all - it stays difficult. running ezprint -t over an ez/fed/raster document produces troff input using a "comment-quoted" form of postscript inclusion. groff (well gtroff) is quite explicit in it's manual page about using other methods of denoting included postscript. Thus, without work this cannot work for free. I, like others, cannot get ditroff onto the box easily. I got gtroff to be called from ezprint fine, and even got gxditview to be the "popup" for preview to work too... but only if I select the -TX75 font, since gtroff uses non-standard (ditroff) backend commands for its ps dvi stuff. I can see two simple ways to get postscript inclusions working. (1) change the way postscript is "tokenized" into ezprint -t output to be runtime configurable, and make a gtroff backend for this. (2) write a post-processor to re-wrap the troff into gtroff acceptable form. awk/perl/shell/whatever. the inclusion forms are pretty simple. and a nicer but probably harder third form (3) do ALL inclusions by .so <tmpfile> and make the contents of <tmpfile> the result of a post-processor of its own. -This would permit arbitrary filtering of new ez bodytypes eg FIG/TeX. and no... I'm not volunteering... George -- G.Michaelson Internet: G.Michaelson@cc.uq.oz.au Phone: +61 7 365 4079 Postal: George Michaelson, the Prentice Centre, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD Australia 4072.
henke@qt.ipa.fhg.de (Juergen Henke) (05/18/91)
I agree with the use of groff, but did YOU try this ?
I don't have ditroff (i even don't know were to get it ...:-) and
have till now no big success in printing with groff - text prints fine, but
(at the moment) it will print only 1 (one) zip in addition to the text, and
no raster at all - it stays difficult.
I remember (may be it's a halucination) someone from the ITC say, that they
are planning to do direct PostScript...sigh
About the postscript object i thought a lot, since i read about this in the
ATUG papers... ...time, where is it ?
At the moment i REALLY would like to get Interleaf a kick and use ez instead,
but how to print ? Where to get the ditroff and this piece of software from
Adobe for a DECstation or VAXstation ? How to change the ATK, so i could print
an ez document with zips and rasters and tables and so on ??
May be the usage of TeX as an intermediate medium isn't as bad as you told,
because we could get eqs to print ?
Sorry for the long posting,
Juergen
P.S.: Don't let me be misunderstood, ATK is IMHO the best Toolkit for X, and
we do a lot of programming with it. But it would be the VERY BEST, if
we could give it to all our staff and our students to do their daily
work... sighcch@mtgzy.att.com (C C Hayden) (05/18/91)
I know it is really gross, but what I do is to use raster to capture a screen dump of the xfig diagram, and then paste this in to the Andrew document. I have contributed the code to read screen dumps to patch level 10. I also added menu commands to the raster application to invoke the window and area dump programs automatically, but I am not sure they made it into PL10. I use the same technique, xfig to raster, to generate postscript for times when I need it to embed in troff documents. Charles Hayden cch@mtgzfs3.att.com Bell Labs MT 3G-408 200 Laurel Ave, Middletown, NJ 07748 (201) 957-5558
wollman@SADYE.UVM.EDU (Garrett Wollman) (05/18/91)
The latest version of groff is *almost* capable of printing direct ATK, with the addition of a program in between gtroff and grops. However, I got stuck with figuring out what to do with the PB and PE. IWBRRRRRRNI ATK could output all "graphical" insets as separate EPSF files with a .PSPIC directive to include them; then groff would work without any fooling around, except that since gtroff and ditroff use a different fundamental resolution, preview would have to be fixed as well. -GAWollman
jjc@jclark.UUCP (James Clark) (05/18/91)
In article <ccB8Ilq4lU4L0u5FYM@sadye.uvm.edu> wollman@SADYE.UVM.EDU (Garrett Wollman) writes:
The latest version of groff is *almost* capable of printing direct ATK, with
the addition of a program in between gtroff and grops. However, I got
stuck with figuring out what to do with the PB and PE.
I was able to use groff to print out an ATK document that I was sent
by loading the enclosed tmac.psatk after tmac.atk. If you start using
this, please let me know whether it works reliably; if it does, I'll
include it in the next version of groff.
James Clark
jjc@jclark.uucp
#! /bin/sh
# This is a shell archive. Remove anything before this line, then unpack
# it by saving it into a file and typing "sh file". To overwrite existing
# files, type "sh file -c". You can also feed this as standard input via
# unshar, or by typing "sh <file", e.g.. If this archive is complete, you
# will see the following message at the end:
# "End of shell archive."
# Contents: tmac.psatk
# Wrapped by jjc@jclark on Sat May 18 11:57:20 1991
PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/ucb ; export PATH
if test -f 'tmac.psatk' -a "${1}" != "-c" ; then
echo shar: Will not clobber existing file \"'tmac.psatk'\"
else
echo shar: Extracting \"'tmac.psatk'\" \(954 characters\)
sed "s/^X//" >'tmac.psatk' <<'END_OF_FILE'
X.nr zT 0
X.if '\*(.T'ps' .nr zT 1
X.nr psatk-unit 1p
X.de psatk-defs
Xps: mdef 5
X/PB {
X /saved save def
X currentpoint translate
X \n[psatk-unit] u -\n[psatk-unit] u scale
X /showpage {} def
X userdict begin
X} bind def
X/PE {
X end
X saved restore
X} bind def
X/troffadjust {
X pop 0
X} bind def
X..
X.de PB
X.ne \\$1p
X.nr zT \\n(zT>0
X\\*[PB\\n(zT]\\
X..
X.de PE
X\\*[PE\\n(zT]\\
X..
X.ds PB0
X.\" The last line before the "'PE" is "\}" rather than ".\}". This
X.\" would cause a spurious space to be introduced before any picture
X.\" that was the first thing on a line. So we have to catch that and
X.\" remove it.
X.de PB1
X.ev psatk
X.fi
X.di psatk-mac
X\!ps: exec PB
X..
X.de PE0
X\v'-.75m'\
X\D'l \\$1p 0'\D'l 0 \\$2p'\D'l -\\$1p 0'\D'l 0 -\\$2p'\
X\h'\\$1p'\v'.75m'\x'\\$2p-1m>?0'\c
X..
X.ds psatk-init \Y[psatk-defs]
X.de PE1
X\!PE
X.di
X.di null
X.br
X.di
X.rm null
X.ev
X\v'-.75m'\
X\\*[psatk-init]\Y[psatk-mac]\
X\h'\\$1p'\v'.75m'\x'\\$2p-1m>?0'\c
X.rm psatk-mac
X.if \\n(.P .ds psatk-init
X..
END_OF_FILE
if test 954 -ne `wc -c <'tmac.psatk'`; then
echo shar: \"'tmac.psatk'\" unpacked with wrong size!
fi
# end of 'tmac.psatk'
fi
echo shar: End of shell archive.
exit 0wjh+@ANDREW.CMU.EDU (Fred Hansen) (05/20/91)
Excerpts from internet.info-andrew: 17-May-91 Importing PostScript Mark
-@uk.co.gec-avionic (1205+0)
> 1. Ability to import PostScript.
This is straight-forward, though it could certainly be made less klunky.
here is an example:
.ne 1.9i
'PB 432 80
'if \n(zT \{\
\!%!
\! 432 troffadjust 80 neg translate
\!
\! %%%%%%%%%%The postscript embedment comes after this.
\!
\! 0 0 moveto 72 0 lineto 72 72 lineto stroke
\!
\! %%%%%%%%%%Embedment ends before here.
\!\}
'PE 432 80
Figure 1. Draw the bottom and right of a one inch cube. The
space for this image is 432 PostScript points wide and 80 high.
The 1.9 in the .ne leaves room for this caption as well.
The PB and PE macros are part of the standard tmac.atk. They work by
breaking the line into two separately composed sublines, so things don't
work too well if there are multiple images on a line or if the image
comes near the margin. Incidentally, giving the whole thing the style
RightFlush or Centrered will make the image have that justification;
that is the purpose of the troffadjust line.
Fred Hansen
(ps. Please spell your return address in proper internet order when
sending mail outside Britain.)datri@convex.com (Anthony A. Datri) (05/23/91)
>At the moment i REALLY would like to get Interleaf a kick and use ez instead,
One of the reasons that I don't use ez more than I do is that it seems to have
no concept whatsoever of tab settings -- I can make things line up in the ez
document, but when previewed or printed, the columns get screwed up. A
related shortcoming is the incomplete "description" style -- I should be able
to put a tab after the bullet (or whatever), and get to the description's
prevailing left margin, ala Scribe.
--
Fly to the sky on GI-GI____________ and shout to
datri@convex.comhopper.XRCC@XEROX.COM (05/28/91)
Does your statement "Tabs are fixed in patch 10 so that they nearly always preview and print correctly" mean that fix 10 is available? I have not been able to find it on "emsworth". Thanks for any info on this. Mike....................... hopper.xrcc@xerox.com