🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <Jun.2.10.31.56.1989.20492@athos.rutgers.edu> mende@athos.rutgers.edu (Bob Mende Pie) writes:
>In article <712@utacs.UTA.FI> av@utacs.UTA.FI (Arto Viitanen) writes:
>> So what is the point to work on troff, when GNU will use TeX (for example
>> all the manuals are in TeXinfo format) ?
> ...  Also, (La)TeX is great when you have a good display device,
> but loses on a dumb tty.   

There is no inherent reason why (La)TeX should lose on a tty.  TeX
is nothing more than a `mason' that stacks boxes horizontally and
vertically like bricks.  The sizes of those bricks are defined in
the TFM font-files, and the `mortar' (glue) between them is controlled
by a hand-full of parameters.  Normally the glue is stretchy, but
by twiddling a few parameters to make the glue rigid and fixed-sized,
and using a fixed-width TFM font-metric, TeX will stack boxes neatly
into fixed-width character cells.  Mind you, TeX does this fixed-width
stuff wonderfully if the right-margin is ragged--I can't think of a way
to get TeX to distribute extra spaces in discrete chunks between some
of the words in a line... though it may be possible to pull each line
apart after its been set and distribute the spaces explicitly via some
macro-code.  Any gurus care to enlighten us about this?

After TeX has done its part, its now a matter of having a DVI driver
that will spit out plain ascii text.  I know of two such free-ware
drivers: dvi2tty and dvidoc.  These are not entirely suitable though,
since their primary reason for existing is to provide fast and dirty
previewing on ttys, not necissarily high-quality plain-text output.
It would be nice if these drivers would be enhanced to provide some
minimum level of font-simulation like nroff, producing `_<backspace>x'
to make an underlined (italic) `x', and `x<backspace>x<backspace>x' to
produced an overstriked (bold) `x'.  You would simply copy the
fixed-width TFM file to several different names so that the DVI file
would contain font-changes telling the driver when to employ these
strategies.

I think that TeX is not often perceived as capable of producing good
quality `dumb' output is because the ubiquity of low-cost laser printers 
minimzes demand for it, and because Plain TeX and LaTeX don't have macros
built-in that conveniently switch to such a mode--you have to roll your
own or use the macros that come with dvi2tty or dvidoc (and even these
were buggy and incomplete last I looked).

-- Greg McGary
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