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Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!ico!vail!rcd
From: rcd@ico.ISC.COM (Dick Dunn)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.wanted,comp.text,comp.text.desktop
Subject: Avoid proportional fonts with nroff (from disc of Xerox XP-24)
Summary: don't count on it any more
Message-ID: <15743@vail.ICO.ISC.COM>
Date: 8 May 89 17:44:26 GMT
References: <371@nixba.UUCP> <1873@astroatc.UUCP> <1945@ucsfcca.ucsf.edu>
Organization: Interactive Systems Corp, Boulder, CO
Lines: 23

In article <1945@ucsfcca.ucsf.edu>, root@cca.ucsf.edu (who?) wrote:
> In article <1873@astroatc.UUCP>, brown@astroatc.UUCP (Vidiot) writes:
> > Nroff cannot be used with proportional
> > spaced laser printers, especially PostScript.
> A little too strong here! We have done this for years using PS fonts
> on the Xerox 2700. It is tedious to set up the character table ...

Historically, it has been possible to deceive nroff into dealing with
proportional fonts, but there have always been some nasty surprises with
respect to emboldening, underlining, etc.  However, beware that in more
recent DWB, the format of the character tables has changed--the ASCII
characters are no longer in the terminal table!  Their widths are all
implicitly 1 "Char" unit, so there's no way (at least that I've been able
to find yet) to play with widths.  This is as of Version 2.0 of DWB, which
you can recognize by the nroff tables being in /usr/lib/nterm (instead of
term) and--hooray!--the tables are no longer compiled.

The up side of this is that it's now easier, with ditroff, to make
printers in the uncomfortable middle ground of capabilities handle troff's
output.
-- 
Dick Dunn      UUCP: {ncar,nbires}!ico!rcd           (303)449-2870
   ...Relax...don't worry...have a homebrew.