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From: rusty@sdcarl.UUCP (rusty c. wright)
Newsgroups: net.text
Subject: Re: TeX as nroff
Message-ID: <210@sdcarl.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 21-Jun-85 13:39:19 EDT
Article-I.D.: sdcarl.210
Posted: Fri Jun 21 13:39:19 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 23-Jun-85 07:32:52 EDT
References: <14000003@inmet.UUCP>
Reply-To: rusty@sdcarl.UUCP (Rusty Wright)
Organization: Computer Audio Research Lab, UCSD, San Diego, Calif.
Lines: 41

In article <14000003@inmet.UUCP> bobo@inmet.UUCP writes:
>
>    We just recently got TeX (and LaTeX) here and there seems to be one
>major obstacle to our use of it.  We would like to be able to make
>non-laser printer output (i.e. for draft copies or for when our one
>laser printer is down). Does anyone have a driver that takes .dvi files
>and produces plain vanilla ascii output. If I'm overlooking some
>obvious TeX mode or command please excuse me and point out the error of
>my ways.

Yep, there's no obvious mode or command to do it.  Next to lack of
graphics (ala pic or ideal) the lack of "ascii" mode output is a
major drawback to tex.  If you ask the people that wrote and maintain
tex their reply is something along the lines of ``we're expecting
that the rapid advances in display technology will make this
unnecessary''.  I guess that they think that in a few days everyone
in the world is going to be buying terminals with the power of a sun,
blit, etc.

On the other hand it should be possible to provide such a capability.
My theory on how it could be accomplished would be to 1) make up a
new plain.tex (or lplain.tex for latex) that always maps font change
requests into a change to a constant width font that is close to the
size of the letters on the terminal.  Or it would use that font
initially and ignore all future font change requests.  2) next you
would have to have a dvi conversion program.  It would take all
movement commands (horizontal and vertical) and make them modulo the
height of a line or the width of the constant width characters.  If
you wanted to get fancy could have it generate underlining sequences
for italics and double striking for bold (i guess the plain.tex file
would use \special commands to communicate the fact that chars should
be underlined/double struck) 3) the modified plain.tex file would
also need to set the line length to 80 chars and the page length to
something reasonable (say the length of a page on a daisy wheel
printer).

We don't have the need for such a thing here so i've never actually
attempted it.
-- 
	rusty c. wright
	{ucbvax,ihnp4,akgua,hplabs,sdcsvax}!sdcarl!rusty