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From: russ@wpg.UUCP (Russell Lawrence)
Newsgroups: comp.text,comp.unix.questions
Subject: [nt]roff proportional spacing and hyphenation
Message-ID: <167@wpg.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 29-Sep-87 23:21:49 EDT
Article-I.D.: wpg.167
Posted: Tue Sep 29 23:21:49 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 1-Oct-87 05:42:48 EDT
Organization: WP Group, POB 306, Metairie, LA 70004
Lines: 24
Keywords: proportional spacing, formatters, hyphenation, questions
Xref: mnetor comp.text:1249 comp.unix.questions:4323

I have been trying to implement proportional space printing using nroff 
and a fully equipped Diablo 630.  I reworked the nroff driver tables so 
that nroff would send a string to turn on the Diablo's built-in circuits 
for performing PS printing and justified right margins.  The output, 
however, was not satisfactory.  After turning off the right margin 
justification, I realized that nroff was wrapping some lines as much as an 
inch and a half away from the margin because it was, of course, still 
assuming constant-width characters.  This forced the Diablo to insert so
much blank padding that some    l i n e s   looked   truly    ridiculous!

At that point, I decided to write my own crude formatter with builtin 
character width tables, but quickly gave up when I decided that 
hyphenation would require programming time/talent/brains far exceeding 
what I could bring to bear on the task.  After looking for another 
formatter, I came across a public domain version of nroff, but it turned 
out to be MS-DOS specific.  

I realized that this question has probably been posed several hundred times,
but my company has only been on the net for about a month.
Any email suggestions, comments, or pointers about implementing PS 
(proportional space) printing with [nt]roff, or similar packages would be
greatly appreciated.   Barring that, how about some tips (or PD sources) for
handling hyphenation?

--
Russell Lawrence                          (Too poor to buy a laser) 
WP Group POB 306, Metairie, LA 70004   
AT&T: +1 504 456 0001                            
UUCP: !uunet!wpg!russ
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