Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/17/84; site opus.UUCP 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!