🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1412@ecicrl.ocunix.on.ca> clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca (Chris Lewis) writes:
|Sounds like a psfig replacement.  Have you looked at psfig?  You'd probably
|get some good ideas from it.  Need a beta tester?

No, unfortunately I don't know psfig. Thanks for your offer to test pspic.
[I have changed the name from 'tpic' to 'pspic' since there already exists
a program called tpic.  Thanks to James Clark for pointing this out.]

I wrote:
|>  ** This is not a very good idea, but so far I have not been able to
|>     force troff to output a new position command if there is no text
|>     immediately following the vertical/horizontal space instruction.
|>     Any hints?

|Yes.  Psfig does this:
|	.tr \(ts
|Then, it use the \h and \v to set a current position and then emits
|\(ts, then follows with all of the \X stuff to do the postscript
|inclusion.  Since \(ts has been aliased to "space", you'll get the
|positioning, but not the glyph itself.  This works well with both
|CAT troff (via psroff's \X support) and ditroff.

In one of the first trial versions, I used a .sp instruction to set
a current position, emitting an unpaddable space ('\ ') on a line by
itself and finally spacing one line back.  Since this trick always
caused a line break, I changed this to emit the x-pos/y-pos directly
in Postscript.  Your solution is much better (it didn't came to my
mind to use \h and \v and to emit just one "faked" character).

|Psfig comes with a patch to ditroff to "sync" the X and Y coordinate
|when an \X is being emitted - an H and V ditroff code will be emitted.

Unfortunately I have no source code.  Maybe I can convince my vendor to
install this patch (I am still using DWB 2.0 and it's very unlikely that
newer versions will become available for my system).

|Your sample doesn't make it clear that tpic can arbitrarily size the
|picture, nor is it clear it can find out how much space to reserve
|in troff if there's no bounding box.

If there is no bounding box, the width and height of the picture must be
specified to the .PI-macro (the traditional way :-). pspic can arbitrarily
size the picture by scaling it to fit in a given frame. In this case there
must exist a bounding box, the width (or height) must be specified, and the
option "zoom" has to be set for the picture.

Regards, Stefan

__
Stefan Stapelberg, <stefan@systemware.de>