Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!blake!mcglk
From: mcglk@blake.acs.washington.edu (Ken McGlothlen)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: TeX to ASCII (it's a little more complicated than that).
Keywords: TeX DVI ASCII text
Message-ID: <389@blake.acs.washington.edu>
Date: 14 Dec 88 18:36:20 GMT
References: <372@blake.acs.washington.edu>
Reply-To: mcglk@blake.acs.washington.edu (Ken McGlothlen)
Organization: Me?  Organized?
Lines: 32

In article <372@blake...>, I wrote about getting a TeX to ASCII convertor.
I received a number of responses regarding dvidoc-like devices, which is
useful to know.  However. . . .

My problem is that if I just TeX the source file, I'm going to get a .DVI
file which uses the Plain TeX cmr fonts.  Using dvidoc on this .DVI file
will give me some---er, rather strange-looking margins.  If a line uses
lots of "l"s and "i"s and "t"s, I'll get an awfully long line out of dvidoc,
since TeX uses proportional spacing.

Am I making sense?

I'd *like* to have a single source file written in straight, Plain TeX, that
produces a standard, run-of-the-mill .DVI file.  *However*, I would like to
be able to specify an \input line that set TeX up for typesetting in ragged-
right, fixed-pitch font, with a user-specified "characters per inch," and the
possibility of turning, say, \bullet, into something like "*" (and so on).
This would be ideal for producing, say, documentation for a program in both
a nice-looking typeset format on paper, and an on-line document that looks
somewhat similar.  Optional right-justification would be nice, as long as it
followed the rules that TeX tries to follow regarding stretchability (white
space after periods stretches at three times the rate of interword space, and
so forth).

This is a teeny bit more complicated.  dvidoc alone won't cut it.  The
LaTeX {verbatim} environment won't cut it, either.  I need a set of macros
which set TeX up neatly for fixed-pitch output.  At *that* point, dvidoc
would be lovely---I hope.

Thanks.

				--Ken McGlothlen
				  mcglk@blake.acs.washington.edu