A/UX 2.0 and Imagewriters non-features

[Richard Todd]

barnett at grymoire.crd.ge.com (Bruce Barnett) writes:

>Is A/UX going backwards? I haven't even installed A/UX 2.0, and
>already I am disappointed that Apple is removing features that I
>believe previously worked.

You mean like the ditroff-to-ImageWriter driver they had in 1.1?  Yeah,
I thought that was rather tacky of them, especially as I just bought an
ImageWriter II. :-(.  

>Now I find out from the README file that A/UX 2.0 does not support
>troff and ImageWriters. Nroff works but troff doesn't.

>The main reason I need A/UX at home is for troff previewing (A
>contract writing a Unix book using troff).

(Guess that means that telling you to use TeX instead (either OzTeX&DVIM72, or 
UnixTeX&xdvi&Nelson Beebe's DVI->ImageWriter driver) isn't an option.  Pity.)

Well, for previewing you can try using xditview, if you've got X Windows
and if you can get it working right.  (It claims to be a ditroff previewer,
but I haven't yet gotten xditview to work as advertised, on either a Mac
or an Encore Multimax.  It puts up a window, but the spacing of the text
is completely bogus. 

>I had hoped I could use the Mac tools for the drawings, and merge
>troff with Mac diagrams. Not with A/UX 2!

Not with anybody's troff or ditroff, even with the Ditroff-to-ImageWriter
driver in A/UX 1.1.  The problem is that Mac drawing programs don't put
their output in any form that troff recognizes.  (At best, you can get them
to put out Encapsulated PostScript, but that don't work too good on a
non-PS printer).

Now, there is a way you can do pic drawings somewhat more readily than the
old standard way (type in your pic code, print out your document, see that 
it didn't work, hack your pic code, etc.).  What you do is use the Xfig
program for X Windows to draw your pictures and output them in FIG format,
then use the fig2pic program from the TransFig distribution to convert that
file to a pic file; you then have a pic file you can include in your
ditroff file.

>As I can see it, my choices are:

>	1) use nroff
		Ick...

>	2) Buy a Appletalk PostScript printer.
		Ouch! Rather expensive, that...

>	3) Use A/UX 1.1
		Or just swipe the ditroff-ImageWriter binary off the 1.1
	distribution disks and install on 2.0.  After all, A/UX 1.1
	binaries run on 2.0.  Assuming they haven't made some incompatible
	change in troff, of course.  (Of course, if they have, you can
	always grab a few more files off those old distribution disks...).

>	4) Use Freedom of Press to render 400 pages of PostScript.
	Somehow I doubt this will be overwhelmingly speedy...	

	5) Use ditdvi (available from the comp.sources.misc archives, I
think) to convert ditroff output to TeX DVI format, then use either a TeX
previewer (like OzTeX or xdvi) to preview on screen or Nelson Beebe's 
dvimac DVI->ImageWriter II converter.  Problems: only works with straight
text; tbl and eqn output doesn't come out right, and pic output isn't
supported at all (ditdvi doesn't grok the ditroff sequences for pic, and
dvimac doesn't grok the so-called 'tpic specials' commands for
picture-drawing that some other DVI drivers support.)  It does work fairly
well for straight-text documents, I've done it.  
--
Richard Todd	rmtodd at uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu  rmtodd at chinet.chi.il.us
	rmtodd at servalan.uucp
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