Path: utzoo!telly!eci386!ecicrl!clewis
From: clewis@ecicrl.UUCP (Chris Lewis)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: Novice looking for troff -> postscript conversion (long)
Keywords: troff DWBII
Message-ID: <896@ecicrl.UUCP>
Date: 22 Oct 90 17:40:26 GMT
References: <864@jonlab.UUCP> <874@ecicrl.UUCP> <1990Oct12.163552.8448@bradley2.bradley.edu> <883@ecicrl.UUCP> <1990Oct16.145303.20446@bradley2.bradley.edu>
Reply-To: clewis@ecicrl.UUCP (Chris Lewis)
Organization: Elegant Communications Inc., Ottawa, Canada
Lines: 50

In article <1990Oct16.145303.20446@bradley2.bradley.edu> brad@ds3.bradley.edu (Bradley E. Smith) writes:
>What would fail is the column of numbers would
>not line up straight. [ with tpscript using periods as a leader ]

For your information:  Greg Woods sent this to me in reply to my
request that he test your sample:

|[ On Thu Oct 18 12:56 (Re: "Could you test this sample for me?"), I wrote: ]
|> Please run the sample troff in this posting through psroff, with no "-T",
|> "-Tops" and "-Ttps" - eg: default, optimized and tpscript.  Let me know
|> if the columns don't line up.
|
|Noope, they don't all work.  However, the interesting thing is this:
|the default, no-optim. version, works fine.  The other two have

[unoptimized CAT troff -> postscript worked, optimized CAT troff ->
postscript, and CAT troff -> ditroff -> tpscript didn't.]

|identical behavior, i.e. they don't work.
|
|So, I tried each test with the tab character set to ' ', '_', and '.',
|since I've never had any trouble with spaces and underscores any other
|time.

|The result is that what troff expects a string of dot's to display as,
|and what PostScript actually does with them, is different.  The spaces
|and underscores actually do work fine in all cases, but only the
|no-optim version, where troff is explicitly placing each period, do
|the columns line up.

|The text, on the other hand, seems to always line up perfectly (in the
|"see-through" test).  It seems PostScript knows no more about ligatures
|and kerning than troff does when troff's ligatures are turned off,
|execpt when it comes to periods!

It's one of two things then, either the width table entry for periods
is wrong (postscript width differs from the R table), or postscript is
doing something funny with them.  Unoptimized psroff->postscript (and
I imagine the other package you tried) places each period individually,
so the postscript widths don't matter.

You might want to try rerunning the postscript program that comes with
tpscript to see if it gets the widths any different.  Or, twiddle manually.
Or, modify tpscript to not optimize runs of periods (don't do the latter
unless you really have to).
-- 
Chris Lewis, Phone: TBA
UUCP: uunet!utai!lsuc!ecicrl!clewis
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