Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!hplabs!hp-pcd!hplsla!tomb
From: tomb@hplsla.HP.COM (Tom Bruhns)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: HP Deskjet Prop Fonts on WordPerfect?
Message-ID: <5160061@hplsla.HP.COM>
Date: 26 Oct 89 00:23:20 GMT
References: <7263@sdcsvax.UCSD.Edu>
Organization: HP Lake Stevens, WA
Lines: 43

mark@isi.UUCP (Mark Bailey) writes:
>In article <5160059@hplsla.HP.COM>, tomb@hplsla.HP.COM (Tom Bruhns) writes:
>> RE:  Proportional Spacing in WP.  I coincidentally just this weekend
>> [...] Since the columns are separated by
>> tab characters, they should come out in nice straight vertical lines...)
>> 
>About a year ago, I had endless problems with WordPerfect and proportionally
>spaced fonts.  After much pestering of their support staff, I was told that
>WordPerfect versions 4.x did not differentiate between the widths of
>capital and small letters.
...
>At the time they had no intention of fixing this :-(.  You might see if
>text with only small letters works any better.
>-- 
>Mark Bailey                                 (I didn't really say this.)

But-but-but---that ISN'T how my version works!  My experiments showed
that the width attribute in the character tables did indeed work just
fine on a per-character basis.  However, the adjustment attribute did
nothing for the printing at the character to which it was applied, but
did get counted in total accumulated horizontal spacing that the WP
driver thought had been output.  So a non-zero adjust wouldn't do
anything to clean up the spacing of the character it was supposed to
help, but would screw up the spacing of things following.  ---  Putting
it another way, if I set the adjust factor to zero for all characters in
the table, the output was lined up in columns just fine, and I could
change the width factor so there was just the right amount of space
between the N's in the test table to accomodate each and every
character, but typically the character would not come out in the right
place.  Usually it would be too far to the right.  I even tried to put
in micro-backspaces to position the character (the character tables let
you output any single or set of bytes for each ASCII character); that
worked, but then the column spacing was screwed up again.  In fact,
that just gave me an idea to try:  I can put in micro-backspaces _and_ 
adjustment factors that should just cancel eachother out!  Wow, how 
convoluted.

I've thought that I might try to write my own printer driver if the new
one doesn't work, though some of the column stuff might be a bit
tough for me to get right.  (Probably easier to try the thought at
the end of the last paragraph!)

Tom Bruhns