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From: pcg@aber-cs.UUCP (Piercarlo Grandi)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: What features would you like in GNU troff?
Summary: Can glue be streched in multiples of some delta?
Keywords: GNU, TeX
Message-ID: <987@aber-cs.UUCP>
Date: 5 Jun 89 15:39:50 GMT
Reply-To: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi)
Distribution: comp
Organization: Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth
	(Disclaimer: my statements are purely personal)
Lines: 30

In article <14622@duke.cs.duke.edu> gm@romeo.UUCP (Greg McGary) writes:
    
    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...

I have been thinking a while ago on these lines myself. The problem is: can
we tell TeX to strech glue by multiples of a certian delta?

If one has the ability to tell TeX to compute all motions etc... as even
multiples of some delta (in both directions preferably), like ditroff does,
then adapting to low resolution devices is easy.

The ideal would be to be able to have motions in TeX expressed, even in the
dvi file, in multiple of 1/Mth and 1/Nth, where M and N are the resolutions
of the device. Notice that this does not lose device independency; on a
device with different resolutions you just scale everything. It has the
advantage that you need not scale on the intended output device.
-- 
Piercarlo "Peter" Grandi           | ARPA: pcg%cs.aber.ac.uk@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth        | UUCP: ...!mcvax!ukc!aber-cs!pcg
Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3BZ, UK | INET: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk