🚀 go-pugleaf

Problem 1.
I'm on a VAX running Ultrix 1.2.  We use Image Network's xroff to do
troff documents on a Xerox 2700 II.  Many of us are quite pleased with it,
including myself.  One thing that I'm not particularly happy about is
that the fonts seem to have been tuned for a write-black engine, although
the Xerox has a write-white engine; characters look a little washed out.

Problem 2.
I have recently brought up TeX/Metafont and have dvi filters for generating
PostScript (for an Apple LaserWriter) or Xerox-style output.  Although the
Xerox engine is write-white, the LaserWriter engine is write-black, thus
for standard dvi conversion I would really need to keep around two sets
of TeX font files, in order to make TeX output look right on each
machine.  I do NOT want to do this.  (I already have several megabytes
worth of font files for xroff.)

Solution?
It occurs to me that I could solve some of my problems as follows.
(1) Use the standard set of TeX fonts (i.e., the write-black fonts) for
writing TeX output to the LaserWriter.
(2) use Metafont to generate write-white fonts and coerce the output into
xroff format, to fix the xroff fonts.
(3) Use a dvi filter to convert TeX output to Xerox format , but have it
read the xroff font files rather than the write-black TeX font files.
Then I wouldn't need two sets of TeX fonts.

                TeX ---------+                  xroff
                 |           |                    |
                 V           V                    V
  TeX write -> LW dvi     Xerox dvi <- xroff -> Xerox
  black fonts  driver      driver      fonts    xroff
                 |           |                  driver
                 V           |                    |
               Laser         +-------> Xerox <----+
               Writer                  2700

Has anybody done something even vaguely similar to this?  (...he asks,
hoping without hope in his heart...)  If so, I'd like to hear from you.
The TeX situation aside, I'd still like to fix the xroff fonts, or have
a general mechanism for converting Metafont output to a form usable by
xroff, so I'm especially interested in (2), above.

---
Paul DuBois     UUCP: {allegra,ihnp4,seismo}!uwvax!rhesus!dubois    |
                ARPA: dubois@rhesus.primate.wisc.edu              --+--
                                                                    |
"Live by the sword, die by the sword."                              |
s/the sword/promiscuity/g