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From: bruce@bnr-vpa.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards,comp.text,comp.unix.xenix
Subject: Re: Nroff driver tables format
Message-ID: <170@bnr-vpa.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 7-Oct-87 11:51:07 EDT
Article-I.D.: bnr-vpa.170
Posted: Wed Oct  7 11:51:07 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 10-Oct-87 01:57:15 EDT
References: <1042@nswitgould.OZ> <500@kuling.UUCP>
Reply-To: bruce@bnr-vpa.UUCP (Bruce Townsend)
Organization: Bell-Northern Research, Ottawa, Ontario
Lines: 52
Keywords: nroff driver tables format
Xref: utgpu comp.unix.wizards:4375 comp.text:1151 comp.unix.xenix:785

In article <500@kuling.UUCP> irf@kuling.UUCP (Stellan Bergman) writes:
>
>Until we got our latest release of HP-UX (5.21) I was nroffing merrily with
>a nroff table I wrote myself...
>... Now, with the new release,
>HP has (finally!) introduced 8 bit nroff making it possible to typeset
>in other languages than English (e.g. Swedish, which has three more vowels
>than English ...) the nroff table format has changed.  nroff -Tlas, where
>my old tablas table should be used gives error messages "Floating exceptions"
>and then bombs out. 
>
>Is there anoone out there who knows how the new 8 bit tables should be written.
>I would appreciate answer through any means (Ordinary mail, e-mail, here ...)
>
	As author of the "table" utility that compiles nroff driver tables
for USG systems that was distributed to the net some time ago, I have been
made aware of the problem that HP-UX (5.2) introduces.  I received a
message from someone at HP who is responsible for maintaining nroff, and
he revealed that difference in the new format is merely the inclusion
of a new integer element in the structures t and t_stor, called Kchar.
It is inserted immediately following the Char element, and apparently
refers to the width of Kanji characters.  As I do not yet have this
HP-UX release, I am unable to test this, but I hope to within a week or
two.  For those of you who can't wait, and want to hack the table program,
try simply modifying the structures to include this new element.
Also, anywhere there appears a "Char" in table.c, elbat.c, or term.h,
copy that line and substitute Kchar for Char.  Good luck.
Apparently, the value of t.Kchar is generally twice that of t.Char, but
I do not yet know how that is used.

	Coincidently, I was in the process of preparing a new version
of the table utility (version 2.0), and I will send it to
comp.sources.unix when it is ready.  It will include provision for
this new format for those systems that use it (is HP-UX the only one?).

	The new version fixes a few problems with both table and elbat,
provides a much better Makefile, and a proper man page.  I have more
closely examined the driver table format, at least those that are
supplied with my machine, and have rewritten table.c so that the
operation: elbat tabfile > tabfile.c (de-compile) ; table tabfile.c
(compile) is an identity operation (at least on my machine for the
tabfiles supplied with HP-UX).  The previous version (1.2) re-compiled
the tabfiles into a different (but I thought equivalent) form;  it
may be that systems that encountered problems with the use of tabfiles
prepared by table may benefit from the new version.

regards,
Bruce Townsend (bnr-vpa!bruce)
-- 
Bruce Townsend (bnr-vpa!bruce)	Phone:	(613) 726-3008
Bell-Northern Research		Usenet: {utzoo, utcs}!bnr-vpa!bruce
P.O. Box 3511, Station C, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, K1Y 4H7