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From: gam@amdahl.UUCP (Gordon A. Moffett)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: FYI: underlining/highlighting in news articles
Message-ID: <682@amdahl.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 6-Dec-84 03:22:32 EST
Article-I.D.: amdahl.682
Posted: Thu Dec  6 03:22:32 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 7-Dec-84 02:25:11 EST
References: <3@osu-eddie.UUCP> <20980012@cmu-cs-k.ARPA>
Organization: Amdahl Corp, Sunnyvale CA
Lines: 46

> Tim Maroney, Carnegie-Mellon University Computation Center
> ARPA:	Tim.Maroney@CMU-CS-K	uucp:	seismo!cmu-cs-k!tim

> Problems with underscore-backspace underlining:
> 
> It is processed by more(1).  Therefore, it will not work unless the message
> is piped through more(1).  This does not happen if the message is short, or
> if an alternate filter like pg is used.

Because of this problem, I've implimented a check in readnews(1) for
and environment variable PAGESIZE, which determines how big an article
needs to be before it is sent to PAGER, rather than having it hard-
coded as `16'.  (Obviously it is set to '0' to assure continuous
filtering).  This is fairly easy to impliment.

A drawback to this is that if PAGER also contains a program line 'pg'
or 'more', EVERY article would go thru the PAGER -- icky.

Perhaps there should be a PAGER (use if article is > PAGESIZE) and
FILTER (use always)?

> It looks funny in a text editor.  To produce it, an extra processing phase
> is needed to convert some comprehensible format into the
> underscore-backspace format.

A work-around can be done for this: write a script that does the filtering
of stdin to a file, and call the editor on that file (removing the
file afterwards).  Make this your PAGER (but -- see disadvantage
above).

> Words which contain underscore-backspace sequences cannot be readily
> searched for in more or most editors.

You can filter them before they get to more:

	PAGER="sed -e 's/_^H//' | more"

The editor is still a problem, though.

PS -- my PAGER is "hp | pg" (system V).
-- 
Gordon A. Moffett		...!{ihnp4,hplabs,amd,sun}!amdahl!gam

37 22'50" N / 121 59'12" W	[ This is just me talking. ]

[ Note longitude correction; I am no longer in the Pacific Ocean ]