Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!mcnc!duke!romeo!gm From: gm@romeo.cs.duke.edu (Greg McGary) Newsgroups: comp.text Subject: Re: What features would you like in GNU troff? Keywords: GNU, TeX Message-ID: <14622@duke.cs.duke.edu> Date: 3 Jun 89 00:28:58 GMT References: <712@utacs.UTA.FI> Sender: news@duke.cs.duke.edu Reply-To: gm@romeo.UUCP (Greg McGary) Distribution: comp Organization: Duke University CS Dept.; Durham, NC Lines: 45 In article mende@athos.rutgers.edu (Bob Mende Pie) writes: >In article <712@utacs.UTA.FI> av@utacs.UTA.FI (Arto Viitanen) writes: >> So what is the point to work on troff, when GNU will use TeX (for example >> all the manuals are in TeXinfo format) ? > ... Also, (La)TeX is great when you have a good display device, > but loses on a dumb tty. There is no inherent reason why (La)TeX should lose on a tty. TeX is nothing more than a `mason' that stacks boxes horizontally and vertically like bricks. The sizes of those bricks are defined in the TFM font-files, and the `mortar' (glue) between them is controlled by a hand-full of parameters. Normally the glue is stretchy, but by twiddling a few parameters to make the glue rigid and fixed-sized, and using a fixed-width TFM font-metric, TeX will stack boxes neatly into fixed-width character cells. Mind you, TeX does this fixed-width stuff wonderfully if the right-margin is ragged--I can't think of a way to get TeX to distribute extra spaces in discrete chunks between some of the words in a line... though it may be possible to pull each line apart after its been set and distribute the spaces explicitly via some macro-code. Any gurus care to enlighten us about this? After TeX has done its part, its now a matter of having a DVI driver that will spit out plain ascii text. I know of two such free-ware drivers: dvi2tty and dvidoc. These are not entirely suitable though, since their primary reason for existing is to provide fast and dirty previewing on ttys, not necissarily high-quality plain-text output. It would be nice if these drivers would be enhanced to provide some minimum level of font-simulation like nroff, producing `_x' to make an underlined (italic) `x', and `xxx' to produced an overstriked (bold) `x'. You would simply copy the fixed-width TFM file to several different names so that the DVI file would contain font-changes telling the driver when to employ these strategies. I think that TeX is not often perceived as capable of producing good quality `dumb' output is because the ubiquity of low-cost laser printers minimzes demand for it, and because Plain TeX and LaTeX don't have macros built-in that conveniently switch to such a mode--you have to roll your own or use the macros that come with dvi2tty or dvidoc (and even these were buggy and incomplete last I looked). -- Greg McGary -- 10310 Main Street #354, Fairfax, Virginia 22030 voice: (703) 266-7249 -- {decvax,hplabs,seismo,mcnc}!duke!gm data: (703) 266-7258 -- gm@cs.duke.edu