Path: utzoo!attcan!lsuc!ecicrl!clewis
From: clewis@ecicrl.UUCP (Chris Lewis)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.i386
Subject: Re: troff & nroff
Keywords: troff nroff man HPLJ III SCO Unix
Message-ID: <821@ecicrl.UUCP>
Date: 29 Jul 90 02:27:19 GMT
References: <11381@bsu-cs.bsu.edu> <1990Jul13.152632.5779@pcrat.uucp> <1407@chinacat.Unicom.COM> <1990Jul26.213709.28799@eci386.uucp> <1990Jul28.152314.3839@pcrat.uucp>
Reply-To: clewis@ecicrl.UUCP (Chris Lewis)
Organization: What me?
Lines: 44

In article <1990Jul28.152314.3839@pcrat.uucp> rick@pcrat.UUCP (Rick Richardson) writes:
|In article <1990Jul26.213709.28799@eci386.uucp> clewis@eci386.UUCP (Chris Lewis) writes:
|>Grap and pic are coming too someday....

|I believe there was a compile-time option to DWB 1.0's pic that
|told it to spit periods out in order to draw lines.

Sort of like using the plot filters on a diablo.  At least you'd
get sound effects ;-)

 ....

|Of course, hobbling around on crutches is better than not walking
|at all, and Chris put together as comfortable a pair of crutches
|as can be had.  Chrome fender dents, too!

You only get dents in 1.0.  2.0's got tail fins and a supercharger.
[Rick, did you ever get a chance to run psroff?  I never heard back
from you when I sent a copy to you.  If you did, what drivers
did you use?]

|I'm not sure how you plan to do pic within the psroff environment,
|but thats my two cent horror story.  Grap, of course, is a
|preprocessor to pic, so if pic works, so will grap.

Actually, what I would be doing is having pic generate (or
transform via sed script) the drawing commands as something
that it passed *thru* troff (analogous to psfig and the 
\X mechanism in ditroff), and have psroff draw the lines.
CAT troff would definately NOT be doing the line drawing.
Very simple and cheap in postscript, almost a no-op with ditroff,
ugly (but you can't do much better anyway) with LJ.

It's not really all that hard to do, psroff can already more-or-less
handle psfig (though it's not directly supported in the 2.0 release
yet), and handling pic would be about the same complexity.  The
main difficulty is simply time to do it, the mechanisms are
already there.

-- 
Chris Lewis, Phone: (416)-294-9253
UUCP: {uunet!mnetor, utcsri!utzoo, uunet!attcan!lsuc}!ecicrl!clewis
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