troff 'Keep' Question

[dje at datacube.UUCP]

Does  anyone  know  a  trick  for  fooling  troff  into  removing its
proportional spacing temporarily?   The  'keep' commands  .DS .DE are
still proportionally spaced in troff.  

We've just gotten an  Apple laser  printer, and  I'm really impressed
with  the  *immediate*  improvement that  troff plus  a laser printer
gives over nroff plus a Spinwriter.  No  changes in  the source file!
We  now have  multiple fonts,  bold, italics,  etc, plus proportional
spacing.  It really looks typeset, not typed.  

All is not perfect, however.  Over the years of using nroff and other
word processors, my fellow  employees and  I have  built many tables,
drawings, and such with spaces,  lines, etc.   They  are dependent on
having no proportional spacing.  I've learned tbl, which works great,
but since we are faced with modifying about two thousand pages of old
documents, it would be really  helpful to  find a  troff command that
would just turn off proportional spacing for a table.  I  think of it
as 'enter typewriter mode'.  
				Dave Erickson
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Datacube Inc. 4 Dearborn Rd. Peabody, Ma 01960 	617-535-6644
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