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From: simpson@trwrb.UUCP (Scott Simpson)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Switching fonts in ditroff
Message-ID: <3601@trwrb.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 6-Nov-87 23:05:27 EST
Article-I.D.: trwrb.3601
Posted: Fri Nov  6 23:05:27 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 9-Nov-87 04:50:41 EST
Organization: TRW SDS, Redondo Beach, CA
Lines: 29
Keywords: ditroff, fonts, typesetting

Okay, boys and girls.  First I wish to thank all of you for answering my
question about how to get a literal string out to ditroff.  Now I have a 
harder question.  I have recently completed an otroff driver for our laser
printers.  I hacked up the TeX Computer Modern fonts and got them to work with
otroff.  I created a roman, italic, bold and special font.  The otroff driver
works great.  I also wrote a ditroff driver.  It works great too, except for
one problem: ditroff doesn't do an explicit switch to the special font when
it uses a special font character.  For example, in old troff, the input

	Hello\(**

would cause troff to change to upper rail, upper magazine (i.e., the special
font) when it encountered the mathematical * character.  Ditroff doesn't do
this.  It puts out the sequence
	
	C**

which means to print the special character **.  But special characters exist
in the normal fonts too and I don't want to look up in a table to see if a
sequence is in a normal font or a special font since you can add new sequences
at whim to the DESC file and the table would have to be continually updated.
Am I missing some obvious concept?  Why doesn't ditroff switch fonts when
it encounters a sequence from a special font?  Any clean solutions are 
appreciated.
-- 
		Scott Simpson
		TRW Space and Defense
		...{decvax,ihnp4,ucbvax}!trwrb!simpson	(UUCP)
		trwrb!simpson@trwind.trw.com		(ARPA)