Questions about nroff/troff

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <3085 at ncrcae.Columbia.NCR.COM> rogerc at ncrcae.UUCP (Roger Collins) writes:
>Does nroff even TRY (given a complete /usr/lib/term/* table) to move, 
>vertically or horizontally, points at a time?  Apparently not.

"nroff" is intended only for dumb character-oriented devices such as
line printers, daisy-wheel printers, and dumb terminals.

>Is there a way of defining a printer table for troff like /usr/lib/term/* is
>to nroff?

Yes, device-independent troff uses the -Tdevname option to locate a
description of the intended device.  This is generally a compiled
binary produced by a utility called "makedev" from a text specification.

>My goal is to print fancy tables and fonts and stuff on a NCR 6416 laser
>printer, preferably in the more powerful ISO mode, using tbl/eqn/nroff/troff,
>and the output look more like a laser printer instead of a dumb line printer.

Then forget nroff and use troff.
I don't know of any troff support for the NCR 6416.  In fact this is
the first I've heard of it.  We use Imagen and Hewlett-Packard, mostly.
(Imagen is much better.)