nroff and termtabs

[Goeke at MIT-MULTICS.ARPA]

          Doug Gwyn complained about not having a DEFINITIVE fix for
"enter underscore mode," etc.  Am I missing the point?  The standard
table has lots of things wrong when applied to the arbitrary printer.  I
can set up the '*bdon' string to work for 9th wire underscoring OR
double-density printing OR italics; the problem really is that modern
dot matrix printers have just tons of options which one wants to fudge
into the termtab in an intelligent way.  I've sort of arbitrarily
started at the bottom of the table and thrown in the codes for (this is
an FX-80 approach, folks) pica, elite, condensed, double, underline,
etc.  It may not be entirely transportable, tis true, but for that we
need a STANDARD, not a FIX, which covers a bunch of these things.

          My investigations of Proportional Printing brought this to my
attention in the when I encountered the '*ploton', etc.  strings.  I'm
not quite ready to say it can't be done, but it may well be impossible
to get intelligent plotting out of an Epson -- in any of its 6 modes --
with the current situation.  It starts with the fact that Epson wants to
see all eight bits, and 'nroff' is busy interpreting the eighth itself,
and just loves to use the null character for a variety of switches,
which is hard to imbed in a C character string.  It also needs to know
how many positions its going to plot before it starts -- designed by an
unemployed FORTRAN hacker, no doubt.

          PS I'll send my termtab for the Epson to the 2 people who
contacted me early next week.  I still don't completely understand it,
and in any event I need to put together some comments on it.

                                        Bob Goeke
                                          [ Goeke @ MIT-Multics.ARPA ]
                                        MIT Center for Space Research
                                        617-253-1910