Wanted: non-laserprinter nroff-like TeX, or other text processor

[Andy-Krazy-Glew]

What I want:
    information on how to make TeX produce reasonable ASCII output,
    	w/wo forward and reverse linefeeds
    or information on any other near-public domain text processing.

Background:
    My home computer is an AT&T UNIX PC, a 3B1.
    My printer is an Epson RX-80 (yes, not even an FX-80)
    	(Dating back to my first IBM PC compatible).
    	It has an individual pixel selectable graphics mode,
    	but dot density is very low and graphics mode is very slow;
    	reasonable speed is obtainable only using monospace fonts.

    I wish to be able to proofread papers and other documents
    that I prepare for school, on my home computer. Final print
    will be done at school on Postscript laserprinters.
    	My research group mainly uses TeX as our textprocessing language,
    although troff is a possibility.

TeX is almost freely available, and I already have access to a version
of TeX that will run on my UNIX PC. However, I do not have a laserprinter,
or an output device capable of the resolution TeX seems to expect.
    Has anyone got (1) an RX-80 version of TeX (using the graphics mode)
or (2) an ascii-only version of TeX.
    Just as nroff is an ascii version of troff, is there an nTeX?
    
I am not very familiar with TeX internals.  Writing a DVI-to-ascii
translator has been suggested to me, and remains a possibility - if
there is already such a beast, I would be interested in knowing about
it.  But, my limited knowledge of TeX seems to indicate that by the
time you have DVI many of the decisions about placing characters,
etc., have already been made; ie. DVI assumes high resolution.  Seems
to me that what I need to do is to change the rules TeX uses when
laying out, before producing the DVI (just as nroff uses a related but
distinct set of algorithms, compared to troff).
    With luck there may be enough parameters to tweak in TeX. Still,
the transportability of macro packages like LaTeX would concern me.


If anyone can tell me of other textprocessing packages that are
possibilities, hopefully public domain, I would appreciate it.

--
Andy "Krazy" Glew,  Motorola MCD,    	    	    aglew at urbana.mcd.mot.com
1101 E. University, Urbana, IL 61801, USA.          {uunet!,}uiucuxc!udc!aglew
   
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