630 MTG - ditroff previewer

[Richard Stevens]

I'm using the "xproof" program from the 630_pkg package from the
AT&T Toolchest.  It's a ditroff previewer for the AT&T 630 MTG
terminal.

The package works, but the fonts look pretty bad.  Since the terminal
has 100 dot/inch resolution, I was expecting better.  (Most X-windows
terminals are around 100 dots/inch; I can't believe a Mac is much better
than this either.)  There was also a fatal bug in the software, as I
received it from AT&T (an fclose on a NULL FILE pointer), so I was
wondering if anyone is using this program and may have some answers,
before I dig into it.

I see two ways to use the package.  First, to get something that looks
pretty good on the screen you'll want to have ditroff use the font
widths for the actual fonts to be used on the display.  However, I don't
see how to do this.  There's an example on the man page that shows
"ditroff -T300" but ditroff from DWB 2.0 doesn't know about a device
named "300" (a Linotype 300, perhaps ?).  Is this where the fonts that
came with the 630_pkg came from ?  There's not even a README file with
the fonts that came.

Second, you can use the previewer to format the page as it will finally
be printed, so you can see the exact line breaks and page breaks.  This
is what I'm doing, telling ditroff the output is going to a PostScript
printer (we use Adobe's TranScript package) but then sending it to the
previewer instead.  I realize that with this mode the output may not look
great (since ditroff is placing the characters based on the PostScript
font characteristics, but they're displayed using the other fonts) but
I'll accept this to see exactly what the page layout looks like.

	Richard Stevens
	Health Systems International, New Haven, CT
	   stevens at hsi.com
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