Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!yale!umich!sharkey!applga!dsmith
From: dsmith@applga.aa.cad.slb.com (J. Daniel Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: ASCII output from LaTeX
Keywords: ascii latex nroff
Message-ID: <1991Jan12.160250.6214@applga.aa.cad.slb.com>
Date: 12 Jan 91 16:02:50 GMT
References: <567@hydra.bucknell.edu>
Organization: Schlumberger CAD/CAM ; Ann Arbor, MI
Lines: 27

In article <567@hydra.bucknell.edu> droms@hydra.bucknell.edu (Ralph E. Droms) writes:
>I've been working on the problem for a bit, and have generated
>a first cut at a solution.  The mechanism uses a new .sty file
>that uses only fixed-width fonts, and redefines many LaTeX
>commands to substitute fixed spacing for stretchable glue.  There are
>also made a few modifications to dvi2ps to generate better ASCII
>output from the .dvi file generated by the .sty file.
Rather than a STY file, I would like to see a different FMT file (e.g.
lplainascii instead of lplain).  That way one wouldn't have to change
the LaTeX file at all.  I know this doesn't solve all of the problems
(e.g. \section is defined with strechable glue in a STY file that is
read in when LaTeX starts...).  But even this could perhaps be solved
by having a second set of the standard STY files in another sub-dir.
The "latex" and "asciilatex" commands would be shell sripts that set
the environment variable TEXINPUTS properly (UNIX web2c implementation
of TeX...).   

This seems to me to be more in line with troff/nroff users are looking
for---the *same* input file formatted differently by two different
processors.

   Dan
-- 
===========================================================================
J. Daniel Smith                     Internet: dsmith@applga.aa.cad.slb.com
Schlumberger CAD/CAM                  BITNET: smithdan@msuegr
Ann Arbor, Michigan                   Usenet: uunet!sharkey!applga!dsmith