A/UX 2.0.1 Q&A

[Richard Todd]

barnett at grymoire.crd.ge.com (Bruce Barnett) writes:
>In article <3007 at redstar.cs.qmw.ac.uk> liam at cs.qmw.ac.uk (William Roberts;) writes:

>>   * Support for using Imagewriters with troff text processing  is not
>>   provided with 2.0.1.

  Still??  I thought they said they were going to put the ImageWriter drivers
back in with 2.0.1.  (For those who are newcomers to A/UX, A/UX 1.1 *had* 
ditroff->ImageWriter II drivers.  Apple took them out with 2.0.  Great Ghu
alone knows why.  Maybe it's a plot to sell more LaserWriters.)  

>If anyone is lucky (:-) enough to have an ImageWriter or ImageWriter
>LQ, I wrote a filter that PROPERLY handles tbl and nroff output. 

Hey, now, the ImageWriter II's not a bad little dot-matrix printer, especially
if you can pick one up used for a couple hundred or so.  (Beats the heck out
of what I was using before, which was an Epson MX/80 with Graftrax :-)

>"rotates" the ink on the ribbon through all 4 "colors". That is, if
>you have a black ribbon, it will  switch "colors" on every page,
>making sure you don't use up all of the ink in just one of the four
>bands of black.

Damn! That's a clever little trick.  I may have to implement that in my 
copy of the TeX DVI->ImageWriter driver...

>Note I said nroff. Troff is another beast. But at least I can print
>out rough drafts in an efficient manner and have the pages line up.

Well, given that John Coolidge has reportedly beaten g++ into mostly working
order, it may be possible to port groff to the Mac.  (I tried it once, with
an earlier version of g++, but ran afoul of compiler bugs...)  Groff puts
out TeX DVI files, and DVI->ImageWriter drivers are easy to come by....
--
Richard Todd	rmtodd at uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu  rmtodd at chinet.chi.il.us
	rmtodd at servalan.uucp
"Try looking in the Yellow Pages under 'Psychotics'." -- Michael Santana