TeXhax Digest Saturday, August 27, 1988 Volume 88 : Issue 78 Moderator: Malcolm Brown Today's Topics: Brief pause in TeXhax publication DVI-TO-QMS DVIDOC for VMS Re: TeXhax Digest V88 #75 Need a DVI-IVD driver for Imagen PostScript emulation for common printers (clarification) Re: Registering MF names Low resolution cmr fonts pktopx Reference work for document layout standards Re: Removing the rightmost elements of a token-list Nubs on tables Source for DVI driver Problems (again) with ln03 printer on vax/vms Making METAFONT read local.mf and write the right output files Re: ^textheight Bug in web2c's change file for BibTeX Microsoft Rich Text Format, RTF ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 28 Aug 88 From: Malcolm Subject: Brief pause in TeXhax publication %%% I'll be heading out on vacation from 30 Aug until 13 Sept. Please %%% hold your submissions until mid September, at which time TeXhax %%% will resume. I'll do my best to send out anything that is currently %%% in the queue. Thanks ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 23 Aug 88 20:35:16 PDT From: glenn%net1@ucsd.edu (Glenn sueyoshi) Subject: DVI-TO-QMS We have a Talaris 800 Lasergrafix ( not postscript ) printer and tex82 (and Common TeX). We desperately want to get TeX out on our laser printer. The computer driving the printer is using the Talaris fontmanager to load fonts into the printer as they are required and delete fonts from the printer when new font requests come along. This setup means we need Talaris (or QMS) font bitmaps on disk for each of the TeX fonts. We have 3 or 4 dvi2qms programs that are either broken, too time-consuming to implement, incomplete, or otherwise incompatible with the fontmanager and/or SVr2. Plea: We are in dire need of {\em any} of the following -oo) what we have ... ... -1) mftoqms (at least) 0) pxltoqms 1) QMS font definitions 2) A complete package of dvitoqms and fonts for free (at most) :-) or advice from anyone who has TeX producing output on a QMS/Talaris 800. Note: we do have metafont working on our system and have to ability to ftp stuff from wherever. Thanks. Glenn P.S. - Please reply to address above or: gtsueyoshi@ucsd.bitnet ucbvax!ucsd!keynes!glenn ------------------------------ Date: 23 Aug 88 23:44:00 EST From: "Michael J. Porter" Subject: DVIDOC for VMS Sometime ago I announced DVIDOC for VMS (the change files and a command interface). Due to problems with our FTP program, the anonymous FTP interface did not work right, and I was not able to deliver it to users. This has now been corrected and the change files are now available. You still need the base DVIDOC distribution which I believe is on the rochester archive. Let me know of any problems you have with it. Mike Porter mike@vax.oit.udel.edu ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 24 Aug 88 07:47:00 GMT From: INFO Subject: Re: TeXhax Digest V88 #75 "PostScript emulators for common printers?" I think, an PostScript emulator for an Epson or Diablo printer is an impossible thing, because PostScript is a very powerful Page Description Language. PostScript supports features like: - rotating, slanting outline fonts - cubic curves (Bezier curves) - shape to be filled with any color or used as a clipping path - text fully integrated with graphics (text characters are treated as graphical shapes that may be operated on by any of the numerous PostScript graphics operators) - and so on ... On the other hand, some PostScript printers (e.g. Apple LaserWriter) have an Diablo 630 emulation. Peter Vollenweider, University of Zurich, Switzerland. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 24 Aug 88 05:41:54 EDT From: Luigi PERROTTA Subject: Need a DVI-IVD driver for Imagen Our installation has just finished building TeX-XeT. Only problem is that we are missing a DVI-IVD program. I would appreciate any information concerning a driver from anybody who has used TeX-XeT. I am in desperate need for a driver for the Imagen laser printer. Does there exist a previewer for TeX-XeT? Feedback from users of TeX-XeT would be appreciated! Luigi Perrotta email: hellion@opus.cs.mcgill.ca ------------------------------ Date: 24-AUG-1988 12:14:47 GMT From: CHAA006%vaxb.rhbnc.ac.uk@NSS.Cs.Ucl.AC.UK Subject: PostScript emulation for common printers (clarification) My earlier plea for PostScript emulation for common printers (Epson FX80, etc) produced only one reply, and that made it plain that I had been extremely ambiguous in my wording. So, I'll try again ! Does anyone know if there exists either a PostScript program, or a stand-alone program, which will interpret a file contain Epson FX-80 command sequences (or Diablo-630 command sequences) and generate PostScript output which will thereby produce, on a PostScript printer, a reasonable facsimile of the text as it would appear on the Epson (or Diablo) ? ** Phil. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 24 Aug 1988 11:26:05 EST From: "Charles R. LaBrec" Subject: Re: Registering MF names There is one more reason why I would like to see font names unique to 6 characters---DEC font file format only allows font names to be that long (well, 7 if you use the "font registry" char). Charles LaBrec crl @ maxwell.physics.purdue.edu ------------------------------ Date: 24 Aug 1988 15:01:27 CDT From: BREEDIMM@ctrvx1.Vanderbilt.Edu Subject: Low resolution cmr fonts I am attempting to use METAFONT to generate 96 dpi fonts for the DVIEW previewer for MS-DOS. I am running METAFONT an a VAX/VMS system and will download the fonts to the PC. When I create the fonts at the usual 300 dpi resolution there seems to be no problem. But I get several errors when I change the resolution to 96. This is what I did. I ran INIMF with plain and input a MODES.MF file that includes the following mode_def: mode_def ibmcrt = % mode definitions for 96 dpi screen display proofing:=0; fontmaking:=1; tracingtitles:=0; pixels_per_inch:=96; blacker:=0; fillin:=0; o_correction:=0; enddef; Next I ran METAFONT with the following command: $ mf &plain \mode=ibmcrt; \input cmr10 Some of the errors that i get include: >This is METAFONT, Vax/VMS Version 3.0 (preloaded base=plain 88.8.5) 24 AUG 1988 14:40 >**&plain \mode=ibmcrt; input cmr10 >(SYS1:[INSCOMMON.TEX.CM]CMR10.MF;1 (SYS1:[INSCOMMON.TEX.CM]CMBASE.MF;3) >(SYS1:[INSCOMMON.TEX.CM]ROMAN.MF;1 (SYS1:[INSCOMMON.TEX.CM]ROMANU.MF;1 [65] >[66] [67] [68] [69] [70] [71] [72] [73] [74] [75] [76] [77] [78] [79] [80] >[81] [82] [83] [84] [85] [86] [87] [88] [89] [90]) >(SYS1:[INSCOMMON.TEX.CM]ROMANL.MF;1 [97] >! The paths don't intersect. > > ; >intersectionpoint->...s don't intersect"); > origin.else:0.5[point.x_.of... > > ) >l.74 ...ectionpoint(z3l{up}...{right}z4l)) >. ; and >! Value is too large (-4096). >l.328 (x,y5r)=whatever[z5l,z2l]; > x5r:=max(x,.5[x6r,x5]); > Is there something that I am missing about how to do this? I would appreciate any advice. ------------------------------ Date: 24 Aug 88 16:12 -0600 From: Jim Walker Subject: pktopx Does anybody have a vax/vmx change file for pktopx please? ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 25 Aug 88 9:55:50 EDT From: Bernie Cosell Subject: Reference work for document layout standards I tried this on comp.text, to no avail.... since there's a fair amount of related discussion/wisdom here, perhaps someone in TeXHaX can help: I'd appreciate pointers to reference works that might be suitable to use as "bibles" for document layout (much as one might use the Chicago Manual of Style for questions a level higher-up). We're pondering some setting up an "official" set of LaTeX document styles, and there are two serious problems we have: (a) no one _really_ knows what they're doing, and (b) nonetheless, everyone has an opinion they feel strongly about. It'd be neat to have something we could fall back on to help resolve things. Are there some moral-equivalents of dictionaries and manuals-of-style for layout and design questions? Thanks. __ / ) Bernie Cosell /--< _ __ __ o _ BBN Sys & Tech, Cambridge, MA 02238 /___/_(<_/ (_/) )_(_(<_ cosell@bbn.com ------------------------------ Date: 25-AUG-1988 15:06:39 GMT From: CHAA006%vaxb.rhbnc.ac.uk@NSS.Cs.Ucl.AC.UK Subject: Re: Removing the rightmost elements of a token-list % Norman Ramsey asked about getting the rightmost element of a list :- % >>> Appendix D talks about list macros, and shows how to remove the rightmost % >>> element of a list provided that list items contain no expandable tokens. % >>> Does anyone have a macro that will remove the rightmost item, even if % >>> expandable tokens are present? I've thought of doing this by reversing % >>> the list, removing the leftmost element, and reversing again, but maybe % >>> someone else has come up with something better? % One approach would be to treat the list-item separators (presumably \\, % as per the \TeX book, p.378) as parameter-delimiters, rather than as % macros. The following code uses that texnique (it doesn't use tail % recursion, or any clever tricks, and it's not all careful about not % inserting spaces (so you shouldn't use it in horizontal mode), and % it won't like \par in the main token-list, so it could really do with % considerable tidying-up, but it does seem to work ..... !) ** Phil. \newif \iftracing \newif \ifmoretodo \newtoks \delimiter \newtoks \righttoks \newtoks \lefttoks \newtoks \nulltoks \newtoks \mytoks \newtoks \before \newtoks \after \delimiter = {\\} \nulltoks = {} \mytoks = {this\\ is\\~\\a list\\ of strange \\ (e.g. \\\bgroup \def \\\if \\ #\\ \let \\ &\\)\\ things} \let \then = \empty \def \iftoks #1#2\then #3\else #4\fi{ \edef \1{\the #1} \edef \2{\the #2} \ifx \1\2\then #3\else #4\fi} \def \append #1to #2{ \iftoks #2\nulltoks \then #2 = #1 \else \edef \thetoks {\the #2\the \delimiter \the #1} \expandafterassignment #2 = {{\thetoks}} \fi} \def \expandafterassignment #1=#2{\expandafter #1 \expandafter =\expandafter #2} \expandafter \def \expandafter \split \expandafter #\expandafter 1\the \delimiter #2\split {\before = {#1} \after = {#2} \iftracing \then \message {[\the \before |\the \after]} \else \fi} \righttoks = \mytoks \append \nulltoks to \righttoks \loop \expandafter \split \the \righttoks \split \iftoks \after \nulltoks \then \righttoks = \before \moretodofalse \else \righttoks = \after \append \before to \lefttoks \moretodotrue \fi \ifmoretodo \repeat \message {After separation, \lefttoks = {\the \lefttoks}, \righttoks = {\the \righttoks}} \append \righttoks to \lefttoks \iftoks \lefttoks \mytoks \then \message {Success: concatentation of left and right = original!} \else \message {Failure: concatentation of left and right <> original!} \fi \end ------------------------------ From: ZACCONE%BKNLVMS.BITNET@Forsythe.Stanford.EDU Date: Thu, 25 Aug 88 10:51 EDT Subject: Nubs on tables I have had problems with "nubs" on the side of boxed tables also. Consider the following example. It produces a table with little nubs sticking out on the right side. (At least on my Apple LaserWriter it does.) I can get rid of the nubs by changing the 199pt to 200pt! This doesn't seem right. Is this a problem with TeX or dvi2ps? \vbox{ \tabskip=0pt \offinterlineskip \def\tablerule{\noalign{\hrule}} \halign to 199pt{\strut#& \vrule#\tabskip=1em plus2em& \hfil#\hfil& \vrule#& \hfil#\hfil& \vrule#& \hfil#& \vrule#\tabskip=0pt\cr\tablerule && 1&&32&&&\cr\tablerule &&11&& 4&&&\cr\tablerule } } Rick Zaccone zaccone@bknlvms.bitnet ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 25 Aug 88 11:12 EST From: "James A. O'Brien (203) 432-4382" Subject: Source for DVI driver I'm sure someone has answered this very question before, but I ask your patient indulgence. I'm interested in putting together (both as a hobby activity and a useful tool) a .DVI screen previewer for the DEC Rainbow computer. What I'd like to find (and otherwise I won't bother doing this project) is Turbo Pascal source code for a similar tool for PC-compatibles (the Rainbow graphics resolution is like a CGA for its square-pixel mode - double the horizontal resolution for a 2x1 pixel mode). I recognize that it won't necessarily be a super-fast program, it would be really useful to me to be able to preview TeX documents at home on my Rainbow (dot-matrix printouts are painfully slow). There are also lots of Rainbows lying around college campuses these days gathering dust. They'd make beautiful editing/wp/TeX engines, I think. My TeX qualifications are minimal - I've never played with .DVI file structure, etc. However, I'm pretty comfortable about manipulating the graphics hardware on the machine in question (NEC 7220 GDC and 4-plane bitmap). Is this too specific a request? Please e-mail any replies to me directly. I will gladly post any software that results from this effort, with appropriate acknowledgements. Jim O'Brien Department of Chemical Engineering Yale University 2159 Yale Station New Haven, CT 06520, U.S.A. +1 203 432 4382 (days) +1 203 322 7222 (eves) Return Addresses (both equivalent): OBRIEN%OBRIEN@YALEVMS BITNET OBRIEN%OBRIEN@VENUS.YCC.YALE.EDU Internet |--+-| |--+-| |-------+--------| | | | | | +--------| host network address | +--------| microvax node name +---------| userid on microvax ------------------------------ Date: 25 Aug 88 9:34 -0600 From: Jim Walker Subject: Problems (again) with ln03 printer on vax/vms I have been using Ed Bell's dvi2ln3 on a ln03 printer using .pxl files. This worked fine except that some of the font .pxl files were missing. The .pxl files were given to me in the primordial past, although I think they may have originated from John Sauter. Ed has recently updated dvi2ln3 to read .pk files. Now I like to save disk space like everybody else and it gave me the opportunity to get the missing fonts. So I generated the .pk files using gftopk.web (1.4) and the gf files on the distribution tape, and gftopk.ch (1.2) that Sal Saieva was kind enough to send to me. The problem is that the final product looks very effete. Many of the lines are so thin as to be almost illegible. Can anybody PLEASE i) Explain what is happening. ii) Tell me what to do - I'm not proud, any gifts will be gratefully accepted. ------------------------------ From: Oliver Schoett Subject: Making METAFONT read local.mf and write the right output files Date: Thu, 25 Aug 88 15:37:01 -0200 Here is a hacky way to make METAFONT read a local configuration file 'local.mf' on each run without the output files being named 'local.xxx'. This is better than making local.mf part of your format file if you change local.mf often. In place of MMMM below you have to put the mode name, in place of FFFF the input file name you want to use: virmf **&cmplain \smode="local; scantokens mode_name[MMMM]"; input FFFF This input sneakily exploits the semantics of the 'smode' string (defined on page 269 in the METAFONTbook) so that the file 'local.mf' is read *after* FFFF is opened. Thus, the output files are named after FFFF. The input to virmf *must* be in one line (in our implementation, this can either be the command line or the first input line); otherwise the output files will be named 'mfput.xxx'. MF code like 'mag:=magstep(1); nonstopmode;' can be added before the 'input' command. Usually it's difficult to type all this manually, so you'll want to do it from a script. Oliver Schoett Inst. f\"ur Informatik, Technische Univ. M\"unchen, Postfach 20 24 20, 8000 M\"unchen 2, West Germany schoett@lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de +49 89 2105 2390 schoett%lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de@ {relay.cs.net, unido.uucp} ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 25 Aug 88 11:06:29 CDT From: thompson%umn-ai@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu (William B. Thompson) Subject: Re: ^textheight Any suggestions on how to have a different ^textheight for the first TWO pages of a document? Adding explicit vertical spacing obviously is not the answer. I want to be able to output camera ready copy for a conference. The conference wants laser printer output pasted onto special oversized paper. Columns are 4.25 inches wide. The first page contains two columns that are 9.0 inches long. The remaining pages contain two columns each 11.5 inches long. With 14 inch paper trays, I can easily get one column per laser printer page. What I havn't yet figured out is how to get LaTeX to change the column height starting on the third output page. William Thompson University of Minnesota thompson@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 25 Aug 88 11:21:25 CDT From: William LeFebvre Subject: Bug in web2c's change file for BibTeX I think I found a problem with bibtex/bibtex.ch in the current web2c distribution (very recently retrieved from june.cs.washington.edu). The change made to "get_the_top_level_aux_file_name" replaces the entire routine with a different one. Line 481 closes the else clause of "if (gargc > 1)" but line 482 is a "readln" (presumably to flush the remainder of the input line read in the else clause). The result is that "bibtex foo" will wait for a line of input even before printing the banner. The fix is to swap the two lines. I'm enclosing a context diff. I'm pretty sure that this is a legitimate bug, but feel free to correct me if I am wrong. William LeFebvre Department of Computer Science Rice University -------------------- *** bibtex.ch~ Thu Aug 25 10:26:28 1988 --- bibtex.ch Thu Aug 25 11:22:05 1988 *************** *** 479,484 **** incr(aux_name_length); end; - end; readln(term_in); @; aux_not_found: --- 479,484 ---- incr(aux_name_length); end; readln(term_in); + end; @; aux_not_found: ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 25 Aug 88 11:49:11 BST From: Peter Ilieve Subject: Microsoft Rich Text Format, RTF A few months ago we got the upgrade to Microsoft Word V4. I dimly remembered something about a TeX-like format associated with this, which turned out to be Dominik Wujastyk's note in V88#33 about "Rich Text Format". Like him, I could not find the conversion program on the disks so I rang Microsoft UK. I was told that it was not part of the standard release (although they did not say why) but it was available free on request so I requested it. Two months and lots of phone calls later the story had changed to "It is being written by a third party and will now not be issued until the next Word upgrade", which would be "soon". I asked if there was any documentation, they said yes, and I now have a 20 page "Rich Text Format Specification". I was also told that the program Word Exchange would do this conversion but I can't find any reference to it in the documentation or the program. I told Microsoft this and they said they would get back to me but several weeks later they haven't. As Dominik said, RTF has control symbols and control words just like TeX and it uses {} for grouping. It does not say anything about spaces being ignored after control words. It also uses semicolons to terminate some constructs. An RTF file is a single group (so it must be enclosed in {}) containing other groups, which must be in a specific order although groups not needed can be omitted: {\rtf0 {character set}{font table}{stylesheet}{colour table}{real text}} The \rtf says it is an RTF file and the 0 indicates the software package that wrote it. 0 is presumably Word, it doesn't say or say who allocates other numbers. The character set group is one of \ansi (for MS Windows), \mac (Macintosh) or \pc (IBM PC). The spec says it is a group but the examples have it as just {\rtf0\mac .. rather than {\rtf0{\mac} ... The font table example given is {\fonttbl\f0\froman Tms Rmn;} with only a single font. \fonttbl says it is a font table, \f0 says it is font 0 and is used to reference the font in the text, \froman is the font family and doesn't seem to be used anywhere else, and Tms Rmn is the font name which also doesn't seem to be used anywhere. My guess is that it is used in menus or a selection area for the Word user to pick fonts from. The spec says that the semicolon is used as a delimiter between fonts but in this case, with only one font, it seems to be a font terminator. Another example on the front cover gives the font table as: {\fonttbl{\f0\fswiss Chicago;}{\f3\fswiss Geneva;}{\f4\fmodern Monaco;}...} with {} around each font so even here the semicolon is not a delimiter between fonts. The style sheet seems logically similar to a LaTeX .sty file, I don't know anything about Word styles so I can't be sure. It looks like {\stylesheet{\f16\sbasedon222\snext0 Normal;}{\s3\fi-720\li1440\f16 \sbasedon0\snext3 IND;}{\s4\qr\f16\sbasedon0\snext4 FLUSHRIGHT;}} and in the text these are referenced as: \pard\plain\f16 This is normal style.\par\pard\plain\s4\qr\f16 This is right justified.\par\pard\plain\s3\fi-720\li1440\f16 This is an indented paragraph, I call it IND. ... The \s3 and \s4 are the style numbers, I don't know why there is no \s0 or similar for the Normal style. Things like \qr, \li \par etc. are basic RTF formatting commands. I will quote the definitions of \sbasedon and \snext as I don't understand them at all. \sbasedon: Defines the style number on which the current style is based. \snext: Defines the style associated with the current style. If omitted, the next style is the current style. The names Normal, IND, FLUSHRIGHT are presumably the same sort of things as the font names and need the same semicolons. The interesting, and depressing, thing is that although the style sheet group seems to be defining macros the whole definition of the macro must be repeated when it is called in the text, it is not just the example, it actually says this in the spec. The example used above also did not even have its braces balanced in the styleshhet group as printed in the spec. The colour table allows numbers to be given to colours, defined as red-green-blue triples with values ranging from 0-255 (same as MS Windows). The colours are then called by \cb2 and \cf0 where \cb is background and \cf is foreground and the 0 and 2 are the index into the colour table. The only interesting thing is that it provides a case where semicolons are genuinely used as delimiters between things so that positions in the table can be skipped by ;;. The example looks like: {\colortbl\red200\green10\blue40;;\red100\green0\blue128;} There are pages of stuff about the main text group which I won't go into. Units of measurement are mostly "twips" 20ths of a (PostScript) point although some things are only settable to half points. Italic and bold are settable with \i and \b but there are also \i0 and \b0 forms which turn them off. It seems that the presumption is that you will say \b bold text\b0 rather than {\b bold text}. It is not even clear from the spec if {\b bold stuff} will work as we would expect. There is stuff about footnotes, headers, footers, multiple columns, line numbering and lots of other things. It is possible to include pictures {\pict ...} in Windows metafile, Macintosh Quickdraw or some unspecified binary format. That is enough (probably too much) for now. My impressions are that, contrary to the claim in the spec introduction that it is a general text format, it seems very Word and Windows specific. The spec is not clear and is inconsistent in places, not helped by some examples being wrong. Peter Ilieve peter@memex.co.uk ------------------------------ %%% %%% Concerning subscriptions, address changes, unsubscribing: %%% BITNET: send a one-line mail message to LISTSERV@TAMVM1.BITNET: %%% SUBSCRIBE TEX-L % to subscribe %%% %%% All others: send mail to %%% texhax-request@score.stanford.edu %%% please send a valid arpanet address!! %%% %%% %%% All submissions to: texhax@score.stanford.edu %%% %%% Back issues available for FTPing as: %%% machine: directory: filename: %%% [SCORE.STANFORD.EDU]TEXHAXnn.yy %%% nn = issue number %%% yy = last two digits of current year %%%\bye %%% ------------------------------ End of TeXhax Digest ************************** -------