Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site amdahl.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxj!mhuxn!houxm!ihnp4!zehntel!dual!amdahl!gam 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 ]