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From: caret@basser.oz (Neil Russell)
Newsgroups: net.text
Subject: Re: ditroff transparent command
Message-ID: <593@basser.oz>
Date: Sun, 27-Apr-86 18:21:45 EDT
Article-I.D.: basser.593
Posted: Sun Apr 27 18:21:45 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 2-May-86 22:54:05 EDT
References: <23@tictoc.oz> <1005@mcvax.UUCP> <139@cs.qmc.ac.uk>
Organization: Dept. of Comp. Science, Uni of Sydney, Australia
Lines: 31
Keywords: ditroff bitmap post-processor
Summary: The answer

In article <139@cs.qmc.ac.uk>, liam@cs.qmc.ac.uk (William Roberts) writes:
> You don't need a pre-processor to turn
>         .BM xsize ysize
> into    .fl
>	etc
No, but you should not need to know the size of the bitmap.  This is
the whole point of the pre-processor.

Anyhow, I have done some research and found that the transparent mode
command leaves a bit to be desired.  Try:
	bit ... | troff -ms | ...
		.KS
		.BM filename
		.KE
and your bitmap commands come out as text, via a diversion.

It turns out that there has been a command added to DItroff to do
this sort of thing:
	.cf filename
which copies the contents of the named file directly to the output,
after it adds some nice positioning commands.  True, I have to mess
with nasty tmp files for my pre-processor to talk to the print driver,
but it works.

I can't post the sources to this to the net, since it contains
V8 code, to take the bitmaps.  But maybe if there is any demand,
I could post a censored version.


Neil Russell
..!seismo!munnari!basser.oz!caret		(tictoc is not ticking)