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From: brown@vidiot.UUCP (Vidiot)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: Q: nroff character sizes
Keywords: nroff term
Message-ID: <1929@vidiot.UUCP>
Date: 12 Jun 91 15:17:18 GMT
References: <Jun.6.18.37.50.1991.13440@romulus.rutgers.edu> <1889@vidiot.UUCP> <2133@ecicrl.ocunix.on.ca> <Jun.9.14.11.58.1991.4426@romulus.rutgers.edu> <1991Jun11.115142.8419@phri.nyu.edu> <Jun.11.15.32.56.1991.21125@romulus.rutgers.edu>
Reply-To: brown@vidiot.UUCP (Vidiot)
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Organization: Vidiot's Hangout
Lines: 37

In article <Jun.11.15.32.56.1991.21125@romulus.rutgers.edu> plona@romulus.rutgers.edu (Lawrence Plona) writes:
<>> nroff could have been written to do a lot more with line printers.
<
<>You're joking, right?  At the time nroff was written, you were
<>lucky to find a line printer that could do anything fancier than print a
<>subset of ascii (i.e. no lower case) and do linefeeds and formfeeds.
<
<Sorry, I did not realize that nroff source was sacred and
<unable to be changed.

Of course the source is sacred.  It belongs to the copyright holder and only
they are allowed to change and distribute new source.

But, that isn't the real point.  If you want to do fancier things, the troff
program is what you need.  Now I am speaking generically here, since old troff
is for the C/A/T phototypsetter.  AT&T Documentor's Workbench is a redesigned
troff with generic output that used postprocessors to print the output on many
devices, one of which is a laser printer.  There is the publically available
psroff (not the Adobe TranScript one) that works with old troff and supplies
output for laser printers.  I'm not sure about other devices.  There is also
the groff suite of programs, which is a complete replacement for DWB troff.
The Adobe TranScript package will take output from old troff and DWB troff
and send it to a PostScript laser printer.

It would be much easier to use DWB troff or groff to provide output and build
a post-processor to send it to your device than it is to try and rewrite nroff.

To me, nroff is a dinosaur.  It has been replaced with the affore mentioned
programs.  One should never think of nroff as being anything more than a way
to send ASCII output to a fixed pitch device, like your CRT and daisy wheel
printer.  Line printers are included in this as well.

I said enough already.
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