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Imprint No 05
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I M P R I N T
The Newsletter of Digital Typography
Volume 1 Number 5
Contents copyright (c) 1997 by Robert A. Kiesling
and the contributors of IMPRINT.
All rights reserved.
To subscribe, send news, or comment, email to:
imprint@macline.com
In this issue:
Ghostscript 5.0 adds MS-DOS printing to its repertoire.
Cyberspace color primers beyond the pale.
Making the jump to HTML documentation with Perl.
Setting margins in TeX documents, revisited.
RCS mini-HOWTO released by the Linux Documentation Project.
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From the editor: IMPRINT is now available via FTP and the Web.
On June 26, the IMPRINT archive opened as part of the Etext Archives
at ftp.etext.org. Our URL there is
ftp://ftp.etext.org/pub/Zines/IMPRINT/.
My very special thanks to Rita M. Rouvalis, rita@etext.org. Rita was
instrumental in making the IMPRINT archive a reality. She is editor
as well of the E-zine CORE and the Lowell Review, a hard-copy literary
magazine. She's one of the persons responsible for the care and
upkeep of ftp.etext.org's extensive 'Zine collection, and, it seems to
me, takes a lot of personal care in seeing that each and every E-zine
in the library is archived correctly.
You can also reach the Etext Archive at http://www.etext.org. The
archive has a policy of not discriminating its content due to subject
matter, which ranges from the literary to the technical to the
political. Chalk up one more point for freedom of expression.
The format of IMPRINT is going to be tightened up slightly. Each
successive IMPRINT has been getting larger, and keeping the newsletter
small facilitates handling by Internet mail software. It also makes
it easier to manage the production of the newsletter. (My list of
potential stories has nearly doubled in the last month.) To
compensate, IMPRINT will likely increase its frequency in the near
future to biweekly.
Finally, I had wanted to review "The LaTeX Graphics Companion," by
Frank Mittelbach, Sebastian Rahtz, and Michel Goosens, but it hasn't
reached the bookstores here. I'm told it's a great piece of work,
which thoroughly covers a range of advanced LaTeX topics. It's
published by Addison-Wesley, so finding the book should be easy for
all of you out in the world. Ah, well, this is Wisconsin, and here
they put Bovine Growth Hormone in the coffee, too.
Happy reading,
Robert Kiesling
Editor, IMPRINT
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Ghostscript 5.0 adds MS-DOS printing to its repertoire.
Producing commercial-quality documents just became more platform
independent. Aladdin Ghostscript 5.0, the latest version of the
ghostscript interpreter, renders PostScript code on numerous output
devices under the UNIX, VMS, DOS, Mac, and OS/2 operating systems.
There are also unofficial ports of GhostScript available for the Atari
and as part of CMacTeX. With the exception of the Macintosh versions,
no longer does your printer need PostScript in its firmware to print
PostScript documents. Installing ghostscript on your hard drive is
like adding PostScript capability to your printer.
Aladdin Ghostscript is the product of L. Peter Deutsch,
ghost@aladdin.com. It is a separate implementation than GNU
Ghostscript, V. 3.33.
The Mac version of ghostscript still has the grayed-out File menu
options for Page Setup and Print. The lack of support for Mac
printing may very well have to do with the complexities of Mac
Quickdraw and the Toolbox. It may also have something to do with
Apple's strict licensing requirements. Ghostscript is public domain
software and is distributed with the source code. Printing for
Macintosh ghostscript is on the developers' to-do list.
Ghostscript supports TrueType fonts on systems which support them,
like the Mac OS and MS Windows. Its rendering is lower quality than
Type 1 font rendering, however, because the TrueType-style font hints
are not yet supported.
The Type 1 fonts that are included with ghostscript, however, are
commercial-grade. Ghostscript comes with the URW Nimbus, Bitstream
Charter, and Adobe Utopia font sets. Common font names like Courier
and Times Roman are mapped to their URW equivalents. The font library
also includes the public domain Hershey fonts, as well as Cyrillic and
Kana alphabets.
On a Windows machine, you may want to use the standard Fontmap file,
which provides the aliases mentioned above. There's also a
FONTMAP.ATM file which maps these aliases to ATM equivalents. They
may work better for you, depending on your system's specific output
devices.
The documentation also has been vastly improved in all versions.
There is now much site-specific information to aid new users and
people who may need to build the program themselves. There is also
better documentation for the ghostscript font library API.
The platforms and devices that ghostscript supports are too numerous
to list. They include printers, plotters, displays, and graphics
formats. Information on whatever implementation of ghostscript you're
interested in is available from the ghostscript home page
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/.
The Web site also contains information and links for ghostview and
gsview, two add-on user interface helpers. Ghostscript is also
available via anonymous ftp from
ftp://cs.wisc.edu/pub/ghost/.
On the Macintosh, installation is predictably easy -- you simply
install the fonts and doc folders below a pre-defined ghostscript
folder.
Installation on DOS systems and UNIX flavours is relatively easy if
you accept the compiled-in default directories. The ghostscript
libraries reside under /usr/local/share/ghostscript on my Linux
machine. I wasn't able to install the new ghostscript under Windows
before press time. Nor would I have the facilities to determine how
good the DPMI implementation is. It would be interesting to see how
ghostcript works in a VAX/VMS environment, but I don't have the
facilities to do that, either.
Newcomers should think twice about re-compiling the executable program
to include some of less common output drivers. Installation and
operation is difficult enough for first-time users. As distributed
ghostscript supports common output devices like PC-compatible HP
Deskjets, Canon Bubblejets, and PDF files. The DOS and Mac versions
support Adobe Type Manager fonts as well. JPEG support is included as
an option, and X11 support is standard in the UNIX versions. It's
easy to remove the X11 drivers if you need to run ghostscript on a
character terminal, but on X displays, ghostscript's character and
graphics rendering is stunning. This has a lot to do with the
accuracy of the Bitstream Charter fonts, which also come standard with
the X11R6 distribution. With the UNIX and Mac versions of
ghostscript, you can very accurately reproduce on-screen what is going
to appear on paper. There's no reason to believe that the rendering
capabilities of the Windows version are any different. Ghostscript
also produces halftones if you need them for offset printing.
Level 2 PostScript support is now backwardly compatible with Level 1
PostScript. Support for encrypted PDF files is in the works, as well
as better TrueType font rendering.
Version 5.0 has pre-defined page sizes for hard-copy output, including
the usual U.S. sizes letter, legal, note, etc.; non-U.S. sizes like
A4 and A5; and common plotter sizes.
The installation took approximately two hours on a Linux machine, not
counting the compilation time. I've installed ghostscript before on
various platforms, though. Compiling the binary of ghostscript itself
ensures that it's tailored to the particular run-time libraries on
your system. The compiler I used was gcc version 2.7.2.2, and, after
taking a half-hour to check that the various settings in the Makefile
were correct, building the ghostscript executable proceeded without a
hitch. The DOS version comes with one DLL and shouldn't need
recompiling either, unless you need one of the exotic output drivers
that are included with the source code.
In a pinch, you don't even need MS Windows or X11 to preview
documents. Non-GUI previewing is possible on DOS systems using the
ps_view program, and on UNIX machines if you have svgalib installed.
Like a lot of software which is based indirectly or directly on the
software licensed by the Free Software Foundation, ghostscript is a
work in progress. Its command line options are numerous, and the
order they're specified in is significant. Like all public software,
ghostscript relies on users' input for upgrades and bug fixes. If you
have a specific application in mind, be sure to read the README and
NEWS files in the ghostscript distribution first. They contain
specific information about improvements from previous versions. By
now though, like much FSF software, ghostscript has matured, and
likely it will continue to be developed as long as PostScript remains
the standard of page-description languages.
Here are those URLs again:
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/
ftp://cs.wisc.edu/pub/ghost/
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Cyberspace color primers beyond the pale.
This document caught my attention in the Usenet news.answers group
while I was thinking of putting together some information about
digital color reproduction, though I'm far from an expert in the
subject. It's a science, believe me.
Even if you don't believe me, one look at the "colorspace-faq --
Frequently Asked Questions about Gamma and Color," by Charles A.
Poynton, poynton@inforamp.net, should be convincing.
Poynton's Color Technology Page, http://www.inforamp.net/~poynton/, is
a treasure trove of technical literature for anyone who needs
information about color reproduction on devices from offset printers
to NTSC displays. Many of the documents are available in ASCII, PDF,
and PostScript formats, although Poynton has an overt bias toward PDF.
Regardless of format, the content of the literature appears solid,
covering topics that include eyestrain reduction, correct monitor
adjustment, halftoning and dithering, and color science proper.
Poynton has this to say about NTSC gamma correction:
Television is usually viewed in a dim environment. If an
images's correct physical intensity is reproduced in a dim
surround, a subjective effect called simultaneous contrast
causes the reproduced image to appear lacking in contrast.
The effect can be overcome by applying an end-to-end power
function whose exponent is about 1.1 or 1.2. Rather than
having each receiver provide this correction, the assumed
2.5-power at the CRT is under-corrected at the camera by
using an exponent of about 1/2.2 instead of 1/2.5. The
assumption of a dim viewing environment is built into
video coding. (From the ascii document.)
The site has links to literature by other authors in the field as
well. All of the information is hardware independent.
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Making the jump to HTML documentation with Perl.
Converting your on-line documents to HTML can range from very easy to
very hard, depending on the format of the original documents. Much
public documentation, like GNU info (.texinfo) pages and UNIX man
pages, are as close as your Web browser. HTML documentation can be
read over a Web http link, or locally if it is resident on your hard
disk.
There are several sites worth looking into. One is
http://wwwcn.cern.ch/dci/texi2html/
which provides a full library of GNU software documentation in HTML
format. If you want to get the original documents, a good starting
point is the Linux home page at
http://www.linux.org/.
You can use the search engine of the Linux Software Map to locate the
archive of the program you're interested in. The Map's HTML pages
contain a link to archive. You'll need to FTP the file to your local
machine and unpack it, then format the documentation.
When you have the man page, you'll need a program to translate it.
Man2html, by Earl Hood, ehood@convex.com, fits the bill. The man2html
distribution is located at
ftp://ftp.uci.edu/pub/dtd2html/man2html2.1.0.tar.gz
and should work on any machine which has Perl installed. The catch is
that you also need a roff-family formatter present, to format the
output in the first place. On UNIX systems, groff(1) does the job
just fine. Remembering to include groff's man macros, the command to
format the man page ls.1, for example, into ls.html would be
$ groff -man -Tascii ls.1 | man2html >ls.html
On DOS systems you could use groff with EMX memory, but CAWF does the
job equally well, in real mode. (See IMPRINT Vol. 1 No. 3.) That is,
you don't need at least a '386 to read manual pages under DOS. CAWF
and man2html accomplish the translation using the command
$ CAWF -MAN LS.1 | MAN2HTML >LS.HTML
Formatting GNU texinfo (.texi) files into HTML is even easier. The
first thing you need to do is get a texi2html script. The one I ran
across is written by Lionel Cons, Lionel.Cons@cern.ch. It's available
on the CTAN archive sites and mirrors. Its URL on ftp.tex.ac.uk is
ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk//ctan/tex-archive/support/texi2html/texi2html
To install texi2html, you need to move it to a directory on your
search path, and, on UNIX systems, use chmod(1) to make the program
executable, and finally make sure that the first line points to the
perl(1) executable on your system. On many Linux systems, this is
/usr/bin/perl. On commercial Unices, it's /usr/local/bin/perl.
Program usage is straightforward.
$ texi2html groff.texinfo
The argument is simply whatever texinfo file you want to translate,
groff.texinfo in this example. For large texinfo files like groff,
however, splitting the file by chapter significantly reduces loading
time.
$ texi2html -split_chapter groff.texinfo
For more information about texinfo, the home page is located at:
http://wwwcn.cern.ch/dci/texi2html/.
There is much more to say on the topic of HTMLizing documents. I've
already written about latex2HT, whose author, Eitan Gurari, can be
reached at gurari@cis.ohio-state.edu. (See IMPRINT Vol. 1 No, 2.)
You don't even need a memory-hungry Web browser like Netscape
Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer to read the documents. You
can byte-compile and then load emacs's w3 mode. If you're using
MS-DOS or a Macintosh, you can use one of the many shareware HTML
editors to parse the man pages.
If you're a hard-copy publisher, there's plenty more information and
utility software available for migrating documents to HTML. Other
formats which can be translated include RTF, PDF, PostScript, and
plain text, which can facilitate upgrading inexpensively to this
universal standard.
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Setting margins in TeX documents, revisited.
This question qualifies as a Frequently Asked Question (FAQ). In
fact, it is included in the now hard-to-find comp.text.tex FAQ.
Here's my attempt to shed some light on the question of setting
margins in TeX and LaTeX documents.
Conventional LaTeX wisdom says that you should create a new
environment, and effect your customizations by adapting existing LaTeX
commands. But the advantage to using plain TeX commands, even in
LaTeX documents, is that you can change margins in the middle of a
document without the difficulties implicit in setting a new
environment.
Neither are you confined to a single, fixed left margin offset for the
entire text, as you would be if you reset the LaTeX parameters
\oddsidemargin and \evensidemargin. You can also shift the margins by
negative amounts, which is not possible in all circumstances under
LaTeX.
The disadvantage of using plain TeX is that these macros are not
guaranteed to honor the temporary margin settings of LaTeX
environments like list, trivlist, quote, or quotation.
In the macros below, note that \lmargin changes the leftmargin for the
entire document, while \lindent changes the margin from the point it
is inserted.
%% margins.sty -- v. 0.1 by Robert Kiesling
%% Copies of this code may be freely distributed in verbatim form.
%%
%% Some elementary, plain TeX margin-changing commands. Lengths are
%% in inches:
%% \lmargin{1} %% sets the document's left margin in 1 inch.
%% \lindent{1} %% sets the following paragraphs' indent in
%% 1 inch.
%% \rindent{1} %% sets the following paragraphs' right margins
%% %% in 1 inch.
%% \llength{3} %% sets the following lines' lengths to 3 inches.
%%
\message{Margins macros, V0.1, July 6, 1997}
\def\lmargin#1{\hoffset = #1 in}
\def\lindent#1{\leftskip = #1 in}
\def\rindent#1{\rightskip = #1 in}
\def\llength#1{\hsize = #1 in}
%%
%% (End of margins macros.}
If you measure text in points rather than inches, substitute the "pt"
specifier for every instance of "in", above.
To define these macros in a document, either cut-and-paste them
directly into your TeX or LaTeX documents, or save them to a file
called margins.sty in a local texinputs directory. They can be loaded
with the command
\input margins.sty
in plain TeX, or
\usepackage{margins}
in LaTeX. Using plain-TeX commands also obviates the problem of what
to do about the extra space between paragraphs that LaTeX inserts
before and after environment changes.
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RCS mini-HOWTO released by the Linux Documentation Project.
Next in the self-promotion queue, the Linux Documentation Project has
released the RCS Mini-HOWTO, written by IMPRINT Editor Robert Kiesling
(yours truly). The mini-HOWTO covers basic installation of the suite
of programs under Linux, including the diff(1) and diff3(1) utilities,
and operation of RCS, which is applicable to all platforms. It's
available in the Linux archives at
ftp://sunsite.unc.edu//pub/Linux/doc/HOWTO/mini/.
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To SUBSCRIBE or UNSUBSCRIBE to IMPRINT, send a brief, human-
readable message to imprint@macline.com.
IMPRINT is copyright (c) 1997 by Robert A. Kiesling and its
individual contributors. IMPRINT may be reproduced in its
entirety for distribution by electronic media, provided no
fee is charged for the newsletter. Individual stories are
copyrighted by their respective authors.
Registered trademarks are copyrighted by their respective
holders.
Back issues of IMPRINT are available via anonymous FTP from
the Etext Archives, ftp://ftp.etext.org/pub/Zines/IMPRINT/, and
via e-mail from imprint@macline.com
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