Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.3 4.3bsd-beta 6/6/85; site ucbjade.BERKELEY.EDU Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!ucbvax!ucbjade!edmoy From: edmoy@ucbopal.BERKELEY.EDU Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards Subject: Re: converting to ditroff -- kern tables Message-ID: <134@ucbjade.BERKELEY.EDU> Date: Sat, 26-Oct-85 19:27:14 EST Article-I.D.: ucbjade.134 Posted: Sat Oct 26 19:27:14 1985 Date-Received: Mon, 28-Oct-85 03:17:11 EST References: <2457@brl-tgr.ARPA> Sender: network@ucbjade.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: edmoy@ucbopal.UUCP () Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 39 Keywords: ditroff In article <2457@brl-tgr.ARPA> phil@RICE.ARPA (William LeFebvre) writes: >Troff has a very stupid idea of kerning. In fact, almost no idea. > ... >Personally, I think the entire idea of >ditroff's kern tables needs to be rethought and reworked, but it will >probably never happen. A company in Toronto (SoftQuad, I believe) has added a fairly sophisticated kerning scheme to ditroff. Here at the UC Berkeley computer center, we have a version of ditroff that does a simplier method of kerning, involving character pairs (We are talking with CSRG about combining our version with CSRG's and then possibly distributing it at some point). >I also don't know of ANY utility (including >ditroff) that uses this information! "Eqn" certainly should. Eqn does use this information, which it gets from the \n(ct register (which is set when you use the \w width function). >In fact, one of my pet peeves with the ditroff utilities "eqn" and >"pic" is that they don't look at ANY of the fancy *.OUT tables that >ditroff uses. Both these utilities need to know the resolution of the >target device -- a value easily determined by looking in the DESC.OUT >file for the device. But neither utility does this. All the known >resolutions are hard coded into the programs! I agree this is a stupid problem in the preprocessors, and that is one major change in our version of the preprocesors. Ours do look in the DESC.out file for the various information. Our eqn even has a separate set of tables for fine tuning the various character placements; one set for each typesetter. Edward Moy Academic Computing Services University of California Berkeley, CA 94720 edmoy@ucbopal.Berkeley.EDU ucbvax!ucbopal!edmoy