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From: brad@ds3.bradley.edu (Bradley E. Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: Novice looking for troff -> postscript conversion (long)
Keywords: troff DWBII
Message-ID: <1990Oct16.145303.20446@bradley2.bradley.edu>
Date: 16 Oct 90 14:53:03 GMT
References: <864@jonlab.UUCP> <874@ecicrl.UUCP> <1990Oct12.163552.8448@bradley2.bradley.edu> <883@ecicrl.UUCP>
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Organization: Bradley University
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clewis@ecicrl.UUCP (Chris Lewis) writes:
>What do you mean by characters "not lining up"?  Does it look as if
>troff is getting the widths of the characters wrong?  If so, either
>you've not built/installed the width tables correctly, or the width
>tables themselves are wrong.  Look into the R, I, B etc. files, make
>sure that they're being processed properly by makedev, and installed.
Well to make a long story shorter.  I have two packages that take
ditroff and make postscript.  One no source and one with source
(which is tpscript).  Since we are moving off our VAX to a SUN and
don't won't to purchase someones own troff, I wanted to get tpscript
working on the SUN.  By using the same ditroff output, the 2 programs
produced different results (tpscript being wrong). Below is a test
file which failed.  What would fail is the column of numbers would
not line up straight.
====cut here replacing ^I with tabs
.po 1i
.sp 1i
.nf
.ta 3i
.tc .
.ps 7
.vs 8
.sp
CHM 201 General Chemistry^I4
EFE 101 English Composition^I3
COM 105 Business & Professional Speech^I2
EE 102 Computational Techniques for EE^I2
MTH 122 Unified Calculus II^I4
PHY 110 University Physics I^I4
EE 201 Digital Hardware Organization^I2
EE 205 Fundamentals of Circuit Analysis^I4
MTH 223 Unified Calculus III^I4
PHY 201 University Physics II^I4
======
How I fixed is as follows 

tpscript sends an horp position then a word. Each word being
in a 'NNNN X (text_here)s'.  The tab fill char, which is a '.'
would be put altogether ( "NNNN X (......)s" ).  What I changed
tpscript to do is to send out "NNNN X (.)s" for each character that
is not "a-z" or "A-Z".  This increased the size of the output but
it worked.

The fonts and DESC are the ones that came with tpscript, and another
program using the same output works.  So I felt the problem was and
is with tpscript.

One a side note I looked at the postscript output and couldn't find
anything wrong with it (all the X positions added up right).  The
only thing I can think is that the character '.' is narrower than
the font table.  But if this is so then why didn't the other program
have a problem?

If anyone could try the above example using tpscript I would love
hearing from you.


brad smith
brad@bradley.edu