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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!mit-eddie!godot!harvard!seismo!hao!cires!nbires!opus!rcd
From: rcd@opus.UUCP (Dick Dunn)
Newsgroups: net.text
Subject: Re: nroff questions on italics/underscore
Message-ID: <964@opus.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 28-Nov-84 04:52:46 EST
Article-I.D.: opus.964
Posted: Wed Nov 28 04:52:46 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 30-Nov-84 07:02:41 EST
References: <941@cca.UUCP> <246@rlgvax.UUCP>
Organization: NBI,Inc, Boulder CO
Lines: 24

After posting the questions about this, I backed away from any idea of
doing proportional with nroff and attacked only the italics business.  It
now works, though the method is a little clunky:

For several reasons, we need a post-processor between nroff and our laser
printer (an LN01, but somewhat un-brain-damaged with local mods, tho they
left us with a comparatively small memory).  The post-processor handles
things akin to col(1) processing to get superscripts and subscripts from
half-line motions, turning on upper bits, etc.  Since nroff doesn't get the
underline character from the terminal-driving table, I just mapped
the various input characters that are underline-ish (_, \(ul, \(ru) to
appropriate other codes; thus when the filter sees an _ come through, it
knows that it must come from the underscoring code; it expects a backspace
to swallow followed by the character to be italicized.  The only remaining
hitch seems to be that if you mark ligatures as underlinable in the
terminal tables, they come out as, e.g., __\b\bff.  However, nroff won't
generate ligatures even if you turn on ligature mode--the only way to get
them is to insert the actual characters.  I found it di\(Ficult to believe
that anyone would type in the magic sequence for a ligature (see what I
mean?) so I just disabled those characters entirely to save a small mess in
the filter.  I should probably enable them but make them non-underlinable.
-- 
Dick Dunn	{hao,ucbvax,allegra}!nbires!rcd		(303)444-5710 x3086
   ...Reality?  Gad, that's worse than puberty!