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From: u31b3hs@cip-s01.informatik.rwth-aachen.de (Michael Haardt)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: MROFF 1.0
Message-ID: <3868@rwthinf.UUCP>
Date: 15 Jan 91 11:14:03 GMT
Sender: news@rwthinf.UUCP
Reply-To: u31b3hs@cip-s01.informatik.rwth-aachen.de (Michael Haardt)
Organization: Informatik RWTH Aachen
Lines: 56

Hello world!

Will Rose writes in "Mroff 1.0":

>1.  The file hindi.ms contains characters with the high bit set (these
>aren't garbage characters).  The file therefore won't unshar, and stops
>the rest of the docs unsharring. A swift edit with vi cures this.

Sorry for this, I was so sure that everything was ok, but it seems as if
I forgot Murphy.  I will post it uuencoded this week.  In my next
distribution, I will avoid these characters, but I need them at the
moment.

>3.  I use an Herc graphics card clone that works with all the MSDOS
>software I've tried it with; and it almost works with hgc.  Hgc puts
>the file on the screen in the right font, but the top left-hand corner
>of the virtual screen is randomly sited on the physical screen.  All
>the rest of the virtual screen is then wrapped right/left top/bottom
>from the starting point.  About one time in ten it comes out square.
>When I have time I'll look at this, unless someone else gets there
>first.  By the way, it takes 20-30 sec to build a page on this
>machine - not really practical for constant use.

You must use softscroll! I mentioned it somewhere in the documentation. 
Sorry for the long preview time, I am using a 20 MHz 386 machine.  It
will be faster, if you use less font and size changes.  The manuals are
the worst case for this, espacially the pages with tables of special
characters.  Usual text should be faster. 

>4.  At the moment I have only 1.5MB of HD space free, so none of the
>printer drivers apart from oki120 would build an output file, even
>from a 2K original.  oki120 won't drive an Epson MX80 (produces
>garbage), may drive an Epson RX80 (mine blew its power supply, but I
>think that's a coincidence) and will drive an Epson LQ850.

Hmm, it should work...  I don't know what are the right escape sequences
for MX80.  If you can fix them to drive MX80 and RX80, please send me
cdiffs to the email adress below.  I suggest that you set DOTS_PER_ROW
to the half value and double the number of buffers in the driver.
The temporary file will take half of its original space, but this restricts
you to 8 inch wide paper.  Perhaps not a serious restriction for you.

Steve Kirkendall sent me a mroff output to ASCII driver.  This allows you
to have a *very* fast "preview" for tty lines (without correct justification,
no special characters etc), but it is ok for reading manuals.

This will be included in version 1.1.  I will post this version, when I
finished working on it.  It will include a better documentation, more
features and a better -ms library.

Michael Haardt

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