🚀 go-pugleaf

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In article <14622@inmos.co.uk (Greg McGary) writes:
>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?

No need to do this. If everything that gets added to the page is in
character cell sized chunks then all you do is to get the DVI driver
to "round to nearest" character cell. Then you will get justified
paragraphs with space distributed,  sort of like, TeX intended.

>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.

About 18 months ago when I was trying to get INMOS to take TeX on board
as the standard text processor (we *still* use RUNOFF as I failed ;-)
one of the objections was that TeX couldn't produce output to daisy
wheel printers.

After a bit of thought I realised the method I suggest above worked and
in about 2 hours of a Saturday afternoon I'd hacked DVITYPE into
a DVIDAISY driver, including underline and overstike "fonts".
I don't think anyone ever used it, and I don't think I could still
find it, but I'd proved my point ;-)

david shepherd
INMOS ltd