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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: <1990Oct23.132755.18431@bradley2.bradley.edu>
Date: 23 Oct 90 13:27:55 GMT
References: <864@jonlab.UUCP> <874@ecicrl.UUCP> <1990Oct12.163552.8448@bradley2.bradley.edu> <883@ecicrl.UUCP> <1990Oct16.145303.20446@bradley2.bradley.edu> <896@ecicrl.UUCP>
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Organization: Bradley University
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clewis@ecicrl.UUCP (Chris Lewis) writes:
>|[ 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.
Thank you for confirming this.  I just wasn't going crazy.
>|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.
I changed tpscript to output this way and I also see that it works.
>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).
I used the font tables that came with tpscript.  So unless they were put
in wrong (which they weren't because the other program works)  I think
it might be tpscript.  I just got a postscript book on the language and
will be looking at it.  The program that doesn't run on our machine does
send the '.......' altogether.  Interesting problem. 

On a different note, I tried to send mail to the author and got no
response.  Is someone out there keeping this program up to date as
far as things like this are conserned? Is this something that should
be fixed?

Brad Smith
Bradley University
brad@bradley.edu