Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ncrlnk!ncrcae!hubcap!gatech!uflorida!ukma!nrl-cmf!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!ucsfcgl!cca.ucsf.edu!daedalus!jw
From: jw@daedalus (Pegasystems)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: pic preprocessor for troff
Message-ID: <1596@ucsfcca.ucsf.edu>
Date: 14 Jan 89 09:01:46 GMT
References: <1000@cmx.npac.syr.edu>
Sender: root@cca.ucsf.edu
Reply-To: jw@daedalus.UUCP (Pegasystems)
Organization: UCSF Dept. of Lab Med
Lines: 24

In article <1000@cmx.npac.syr.edu> crockett@top.cis.syr.edu (Peter Crockett) writes:
>A professor came here with some troff source which uses a troff
>preprocessor called pic.  He had the code for pic sent here, but it
>generates a troff directive D which is not understood by any troff on
>campus.  Anyone know anything about pic and/or the nature of this
>mysterious directive?
>
the \D troff command belongs to ditroff and will not work with
nroff or troff if the troff is the old troff often distributed with systems.
however there is a command line argument to pic to use the old \L and \l
commands but this has only limited useability.

The \D commands are much more versital in how they draw lines, using the
printing device's native drawing facility rather than drawing with
\(ru an\(br (ruling underline and vertical bar).  This means that the
\D enables the drawing of circles, elipses and splines (wiggly lines)
if the printer is capable of it (often if a printer is not capable of it
the post-processor will overcome this limitation).

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