Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cwjcc!hal!ncoast!allbery From: allbery@ncoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery) Newsgroups: comp.text Subject: Re: What features would you like in GNU troff? Message-ID: <13768@ncoast.ORG> Date: 21 Jun 89 22:32:26 GMT References: <779@pcrat.UUCP> <355@wjh12.harvard.edu> <8388@killer.DALLAS.TX.US> <159@unmvax.unm.edu> Reply-To: allbery@ncoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery) Followup-To: comp.text Distribution: comp Organization: Cleveland Public Access UN*X, Cleveland, Oh Lines: 34 As quoted from <159@unmvax.unm.edu> by brainerd@unmvax.unm.edu (Walt Brainerd): +--------------- | A feature we have not implemented, but think desirable is font families, | so that switching to _italic_ means italic of the current font family, | for example. +--------------- I have a macro package for ditroff which does this to some extent; at the moment, it's limited to handling bold and italic independently in Helvetica, but it shouldn't be difficult to adapt it to handle font families as well. The only problem with it is that, since ditroff can't determine fonts dynamically from within itself, it would have to be configured from an outside program. (I will probably use an .sy in the macro package to build the list on the fly from an ASCII font-description file.) It'll take some work to extricate it from the macro package it lives in (an internal current-project-list macro package) and add multiple font capability, but if there's sufficient interest I can post it. Oh, one other feature that I may make optional: if you switch to italic on a semi-permanent basis (e.g. issue .I without arguments), then the meanings of .I and .R with arguments are swapped within that block, e.g. ".I foo" will produce "foo" in the Roman style for the current font. I found it useful to "hide" the fact that comments are in italic while projects are in Roman. (Note that by "Roman" I mean the non-italic, standard stroke weight font style for the current font; that isn't (di)troff usage, but I think it's standard typesetters' usage.) ++Brandon -- Brandon S. Allbery, moderator of comp.sources.misc allbery@ncoast.org uunet!hal.cwru.edu!ncoast!allbery ncoast!allbery@hal.cwru.edu Send comp.sources.misc submissions to comp-sources-misc@ NCoast Public Access UN*X - (216) 781-6201, 300/1200/2400 baud, login: makeuser