Path: utzoo!mnetor!tmsoft!eci386!woods
From: woods@eci386.uucp (Greg A. Woods)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: In troff, is "|" supposed to be slanted in Italic?
Message-ID: <1991May14.182852.12034@eci386.uucp>
Date: 14 May 91 18:28:52 GMT
References: <1470@ecicrl.ocunix.on.ca> <1991May6.152022.28260@cbnewsl.att.com> <1991May8.190648.3769@eci386.uucp> <1991May10.164756.22896@cbnewsl.att.com>
Reply-To: woods@eci386.UUCP (Greg A. Woods)
Organization: Elegant Communications Inc.
Lines: 28

In article <1991May10.164756.22896@cbnewsl.att.com> npn@cbnewsl.att.com (nils-peter.nelson) writes:
> Greg Woods suggests that if tbl used line drawing functions
> we wouldn't have alignment problems in the post-processors.
> True for troff, but, alas, there are still nroff users around.

Ah, but unless my eyes deceive me, nroff knows perfectly well how to
draw lines (i.e. horizontal and vertical lines) specified by the
line drawing escape seqences (i.e. \l'Nc' and \L'Nc'), even if the
character ('c') is not specified.  Why could troff not translate this
internally into proper draw commands (i.e. \D'l N 0' and \D'l 0 N')
when no character is specified?

Now if it could, tbl could use \l'' and \L'' to draw it's boxes, and
when processed by troff, we'd get the line drawing functions as
defined for the given device.  In fact, unless my eyes also deceive
me, tbl almost does this now, execpt it specifies the character it
thinks should be used for line drawing.

Of course this is all rather pointless, since the great majority of us
will be running either older (DWB-2.0 and previous) troff's (and
tbl's), or the Berkely di-troff included in SysVr4.0, and since we
don't all have sources, we won't be able to make our troff's (and
tbl's) do anything like this.
-- 
							Greg A. Woods
woods@{eci386,gate,robohack,ontmoh,tmsoft}.UUCP		ECI and UniForum Canada
+1-416-443-1734 [h]  +1-416-595-5425 [w]  VE3TCP	Toronto, Ontario CANADA
Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible-ORWELL