[comp.text.tex] dvidoc and other "ascii" drivers

des@frogland.inmos.co.uk (David Shepherd) (02/08/91)

I have a minimal TeX setup at home (SBTeX from floppy disks) which I like
to use for any text processing I do at home (eg minutes of meetings etc
from various organisations I'm in) as I'm familiar with LaTeX and have
no desire to learn a different system. My output device is a Star 9-pin
printer. I can output to this with cm fonts using an adapted version
of the Beebe drivers ... but its about 8mins per page :-)

I have therefore been using dvidoc mostly which produces acceptable
output -- however it has no font changing whereas the printer will do
italics and bold, roman and sans serif and a sort of small caps.

I have been modified dvidoc recently to incorporate these font changes
so that I can now use \bf, \em etc.

What I would like to do now is to play around with the possibility of
using the printers proportional spaced mode to get a better standard
of output. But .... dvidoc has horrendous code (web->pascal->c). Does
anyone know of a cleaner dvi to ascii program that i could use as
a basis for further changes (preferrably something actually written
in C so that it may be clearer what's going on.

BTW before you all jump up and down screaming use dvidoc.web i don't know
web and I don't think it translates into C properly. (in any case cweb
i think assumes 32bit unix target & not 16 bit MS-DOS)

if not it looks like donning a full body wading suit and jumping in :-)

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david shepherd: des@inmos.co.uk or des@inmos.com    tel: 0454-616616 x 529
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