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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!mit-eddie!godot!harvard!seismo!ut-sally!riddle
From: riddle@ut-sally.UUCP (Prentiss Riddle)
Newsgroups: net.text
Subject: Ditroff troubles
Message-ID: <334@ut-sally.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 28-Nov-84 12:27:12 EST
Article-I.D.: ut-sally.334
Posted: Wed Nov 28 12:27:12 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 30-Nov-84 07:03:30 EST
Distribution: net
Organization: U. of Tx. at Houston-in-the-Hills
Lines: 31

I've recently installed ditroff on ut-sally (a vax 780 running 4.2bsd) and
am quite pleased.  Ditroff stands for Device-Independent Troff and, among
its other features, provides for the inclusion of graphics in the middle of
text by the use of languages like pic and ideal.  I've run into a couple of
snags, though, and I wonder if anyone out there has any insight into them.

The main problem seems trivial but for certain applications simply can't be
ignored: ditroff screws up square roots (as produced using the preprocessor
deqn).  Specifically, the horizontal bar which should appear over the
expression to be sqrted is too low and is dashed rather than solid.  It
appears that the "root extender" character \(rn is somehow at fault.  I've
used rst2ch to browse around in the likely raster files, but I can't even
find the \(rn character to check it.  Any ideas where \(rn should be or how
I could fix the problem?

This may or may not be related to another difficulty which I've already
solved:  Because of licensing complications, the ditroff distribution tape
we received didn't include raster files for our output device, an Imagen
Imprint-10.  The distribution tape did include width files, however, which
contained at least a few minor inconsistencies with the raster files we got
from Imagen -- specifically, the width files thought that certain fonts
should contain ligatures that weren't there.  Once I had identified the
problem, it was relatively simple to amend the width files to eliminate the
hallucinatory ligatures.

Any hints, hunches, or suggestions would be appreciated.  Also, if folks
want to show off their snazziest illustrations using pic, I'll be happy
to ooh and ahh.

--- Prentiss Riddle ("Aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada.")
--- {ihnp4,harvard,seismo,gatech,ctvax}!ut-sally!riddle