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Imprint No 03
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I M P R I N T
The Newsletter of Digital Typography
Volume 1 Number 3
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:
To the Macs! Workstation-grade fonts and display software.
CMacTeX Version 2.6 announced.
Where to find support for troff, et al.
Using CAWF to format man pages under DOS.
Expanded-memory teTeX binaries released.
New Linux/teTeX Local Guide available.
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A lot of new software packages and upgrades have come on-line in the
last several weeks. I'll cover as many of them as I can and try to
catch up with the rest in the future.
I'll try to keep the size of the newsletter to under 25 kbytes per
issue, to facilitate mailing and handling. If the newsletters start
getting larger, I may increase the frequency, say, to semi-monthly.
(That is, every two weeks; fortnightly in the U.K.)
In the meantime, keep the e-mail coming. I will mention specific
messages if they seem to be of general interest, or if you have a
specific comment or question that you would like to put to IMPRINT's
readers.
A final note: Please remember, when you request current or past issues
of IMPRINT, your e-mail address will *not* be added to our
subscribers' list automatically. Kindly request to be added. But why
not subscribe? It's free, and you might find an idea or two that
repays the time it took to scan the newsletter.
And who knows? I can be persuaded to write a personalized greeting if
you request a gift subscription of IMPRINT for someone. (Yes, it's
happened.)
Thanks, and happy reading.
Robert Kiesling
Editor, IMPRINT
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To the Macs! Workstation-grade fonts and display software.
SmoothType, Version 1.2, is a must-see if you stare at a Mac display
for more than ten minutes at a time. It is a system extension that
performs anti-aliasing on text characters, an imaging strategy that is
used by laser and ink jet printers to smooth the jagged edges of
characters.
SmoothType is written by Gregory D. Landweber, greg@math.harvard.edu.
It will work in tandem with Adobe Type Manager if you have Type 1
fonts installed on your system, the author says. It works great on
its own, too.
SmoothType is shareware, so please send in the registration fee if
you're going to keep it on your system. The author claims that
SmoothType's best results are achieved on high-resolution monitors of
at least 256 colors. The only Macintosh display I have available is
that of Chanel2, my PowerBook 520, which has a passive-matrix display
with 16 shades of gray. Smoothtype still yields a marked improvement
in display quality on even this meager device. SmoothType works quite
well with the TrueType fonts which have come standard with the Mac
System for what seems like forever. With better fonts,the results can
be stunning.
The only compatibility problem I noticed was that Smoothtype caused my
venerable Emacs 18.59 editor to bomb. But Emacs on a Macintosh uses a
non-standard display strategy. SmoothType seemed to have no problems
with any of the other software on Chanel2.
I installed SmoothType in tandem with the CourierX fonts by William I.
Johnston, wij@world.std.com, Johnston ported the fonts, which are
based on the publicly-available Bitstream Courier fonts, so Mac users
have an alternative to the "anemic" Courier font which is standard on
Macs. (That's William's description.) The results are nearly as good
as viewing -courier-12-whatever- on an xterm. After staring at the
screen for a while, the difference in the comfort level is very
apparent. It's much easier to gaze at these glyphs for long periods
of time than at the standard Courier fonts.
CourierX fonts are available at http://world.std.com/%7Ewij/ and
ftp://ftp.std.com/pub/wij/.
SmoothType and Courier X work very well in the small point sizes I use
for Stickies notes.... If I could only duplicate the yellow shade of
standard Post-It (tm) Notes, I would be tempted to write on the screen
with a ball point pen.
Also available is CourierOE, which provides some additional characters
specific to Old English, like eth and thorn, and CourierHT, which the
author claims is useful for validating HTML pages, since it contains
the complete set of HTML character encodings. William is not charging
for the translation of these fonts. Drop him a line anyway. He was
quite helpful in arranging that the fonts would be accessible via FTP,
and seems quite pleased that his handiwork is appreciated.
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CMacTeX Version 2.6 announced.
Tom Kiffe, tkiffe@math.tamu.edu, has announced the release of Version
2.6 of his CMacTeX package, one of the better-known TeXes for the Mac.
New in version 2.6 is an improved ghostview previewer which allows the
pages of any document compliant with Adobe's Document Structuring
Conventions to be viewed in any order. Color is fully supported for
color displays and printers. There is also an upgrade of Tomas
Rokicki's dvips, and improved AppleScript support. CMacTeX 2.6
includes a sampling of AppleScripts which perform various tasks,
including full LaTeX and PSNFSS installations.
CMacTeX now supports the standard AppleScript suite to open, close,
and print documents and adds functions to get and set the available
TeX formats via script commands. It should be easy to add CMacTeX
support to just about any text editor that supports scriptable
external commands.
There is also a PostScript to PDF translator that works as well as
anything in the PDF world. I'll get to that further on.
CMacTeX is shareware. I've been a registered CMacTeX user for some
time and can attest to its reliability and usefulness. It's as
UNIX-compliant as a Mac application gets, and DVI files which have
been TeXed on other systems have no trouble displaying on CMacTeX.
The downside of this UNIX look-and-feel is that CMacTeX is more
difficult to install than the average Mac application. However, Tom's
step-by-step installation notes are complete enough that you should
have no trouble installing the software if you follow them carefully.
Tom also provides very good technical support. On all the occasions
I've contacted him, Tom has helped solve whatever problem I had, or
thought I had. He's also responsive to suggestions for improvements
and constructive criticism, which is a plus for those of us who like
our formatting software to work.
It took an hour and a half from the time I finished installing CMacTeX
to print the file, testpage.tex. This included resetting many of
CMacTeX's default settings from the PostScript (tm) imaging software.
I think the delay was caused by the fact that I didn't start with the
complete distribution and installed the various pieces of CMacTeX in
the wrong order. I had been using wuarchive.wustl.edu as my default
CTAN site, but they don't carry the complete TeX archives any longer.
Definitely, if you're going to FTP CMacTeX to your site, get the
complete distribution from the official TeX archives, ftp.tex.ac.uk
and ftp.dante.de. CMacTeX at the UK CTAN archive is located at
ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/ctan/tex-archive/systems/mac/cmactex.
When configuring CMacTeX, it's important to turn search path debugging
on, so you know where CMacTeX is looking for its files. It's also
important to remember that CMacTeX stores its settings in a
Preferences file. Every time you change a setting you must completely
exit the TeX program and all its supporting programs, then restart
them to ensure your new settings will take effect.
Earlier, intermediate releases of CMacTeX had problems printing
underlines on Hewlett Packard printers. Despite what many TeXperts
say, underline emphasis and monospaced type is still required by many
editors (and professors), because 1) it's still the style of the MLA;
and, 2) underlined, monospaced type is much easier to read.
I'm happy to say that Tom has corrected the underlining problem, and
has added some impressive support for the HP drivers like the 600
series driver Chanel2 uses. CMacTeX now compensates automatically for
the one-half inch space at the page edges where HP printers leave
blank space. CMacTeX scales page images accordingly. It renders them
at 104% on-screen by default. You can set the scaling size to 100% to
reflect the actual, accurately scaled to U.S. letter size.
Because CMacTeX uses the clipboard to pass information between the
various modules, you might run into difficulty if you're using a
clipboard extension like CopyPaste. CMacTeX is otherwise
straightforward in its implementation.
Overall, I'm impressed by this version of CMacTeX. Many of the rough
edges of earlier releases have been smoothed out, although having both
a DVI previewer and a DVI print program still seems a little redundant
to me, because the xdvi program also displays the image on-screen
before it print any pages.
I'm glad Tom decided to focus on CMacTeX's (and the Macintosh's)
strengths. There still isn't any support for PostScript printing via
ghostscript, and to print PostScript using an intermediate PDF file is
intolerably slow. Although the quality of the image is quite good in
these circumstances, the ps2pdf program transfers the font images from
the DVI file to the PDF file as bit maps. This results in huge PDF
files which typically take (in Chanel2's case) an hour to process,
because of the non-preemptive multitasking of the Mac OS, and the
need, on Chanel2 at least, for virtual memory to be enabled.
Background printing is out of the question.
In short, memory and disk requirements increase significantly when
processing PDF files. I've tried it and it's not practical for
producing documents at this site. If you want to output PostScript
under production conditions, you will still need a PostScript-capable
printer with CMacTeX.
Any difficulties you might encounter with CMacTeX are due to
limitations of TeX systems in general, or limitations of the Mac
system hardware and software. A newcomer to TeX is likely to feel
overwhelmed by CMacTeX, but that is hardly unique to this
implementation.
Personally, I would like to see direct printing support added to
ghostscript (or ghostview). There's no reason why a UNIX version of
ghostscript should provide printer support while a Mac version
doesn't. It seems to me that any image which can be rasterized on the
screen can also be delivered to a printer in bit-mapped form. Or, if
there is a reason why this can't be done, it must reside somewhere in
the mechanics of the Mac Toolbox API, whose complexities I don't even
begin to understand.
I would also like to see more documentation with regard to expanding
CMacTeX. Tom has included scripts which will install LaTeX2e and
PSNFSS. These welcome additions certainly are useful when you upgrade
your LaTeX2e files.
A resource guide to finding TeX and LaTeX add-ons would also be
welcome. This is a relatively small package, by TeX standards. It is
entirely possible that you will want to add significantly to its
capabilities by installing packages which are available on the CTAN
network.
The good news is, of course, that CMacTeX follows cross-platform TeX
installation conventions as much as possible. The main limitations of
your TeX installation will be hardware-related. CMacTeX is as
capable and expandable as any TeX package in existence today.
And it's a bargain. CMacTeX doesn't come with the add-ons of the
commercial systems, but it provides a solid, industry standard TeX and
LaTeX system which you can upgrade yourself, at a fraction of the
price of commercial systems.
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Where to find support for troff, et al.
I received an e-mail message from pete@smtl.co.uk, who is looking for
some troff or TeX macros to format newsletters. He writes that he
needs auto-balancing of one, two, or three columns, commonly on the
same page.
Troff macro writing isn't my strong suit even under the best of
conditions. Nor have I much to do with multiple columns in TeX. Pete
has examined of the existing macro packages and wants something more
reliable. ("Bulletproof" would be an appropriate term, if my own
experience is a guide.) If there is a macro package that does what
Pete describes, kindly consider dropping him a line.
There is no longer much troff/groff information available via
commercial channels. It seems like TeX, PDF, and HTML have squeezed
troff programs, et al. into commercial also-rans. There are three
troff reference books mentioned in the comp.text FAQ. Two of them,
"Unix Text Processing," and "Troff typesetting (sic) for UNIX
Systems," are out of print. One, by a German press, would be nearly
impossible to obtain in the U.S. Chris Lewis, author of the comp.tex
FAQ, says that the book "troff-Programmierung: proffessionelle
Textverarbeitung und Schriftsatz unter UNIX," is "reportedly superb,
but even if you could find it, you would need to be able to understand
German."
Still, if you know where to locate the above titles, please let our
readers know. Drop me a line. The publishers listed are Hayden,
Prentice-Hall, and Hanser Verlag, respectively.
Documentor's Workbench and BSD implementations of troff come with
manuals and man pages. There are a few inconsistencies between troff
and groff, and they are significant enough that, a basic document
request which does not translate can leave you in a lurch. There isn't
much information available for groff, only the man pages, which cover
installation, operation, and using the groff pre- and post-processors,
and the man, me, and ms source code.
The place I looked for groff information on the 'Net was
http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~trent/gnu/groff/index.html, whose author,
trent@cs.pdx.edu, is doing the world a public service by authoring a
groff reference manual in texinfo format. This complete guide has
indices to the ms, me, and man macros, installation guide, programming
tutorial, and references for tbl, eqn, pic, grap, refer, soelim, and
the groff post-processors. The author claims it's still a work in
progress. However, you can acquire it in its current state at
ftp.co.pdx.edu//pub/gnu/groff/*.
UNIX admins can take a couple of cues from the DOS world. There is
Vic Abell's CAWF. (Again, see below.) A reasonably complete nroff
clone, with tutorial and reference, was put out by Dr. Dobb's Journal
in the 1980's. Good places to start looking for the code and the
macro packages are the back issues of DDJ, or the MTI web site,
www.ddj.com.
Still and all, the nice thing about troff/groff, et al., is that the
software is considerably more frugal of system resources than all but
the tiniest TeX installations. PostScript support is an integral part
of troff and friends, rather than an add-on as with TeX. If anyone
knows of other sources of information for troff and groff, please drop
me a line here at IMPRINT and I'll share it with our readers. These
low-profile but very important systems won't be going by the wayside
anytime soon.
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Using CAWF to format man pages under DOS.
The other advantage of troff-family formatters is that they run on
all popular operating systems. Programs which run under the Mac OS,
UNIX, and DOS, generally find a home here at IMPRINT. These rare
goodies tend to be bare-bones utilities which have filtered down from
the mainframe world. They don't rely on flashy, OS-specific screen
and keyboard I/O, which add overhead.
They also tend to be free. Ckermit gets a workout here. So does
Emacs. And we've added CAWF, the C Amazingly Workable Formatter, to
our repertoire.
CAWF was recently upgraded to version 4.08 by its author, Vic Abell,
abe@cc.purdue.edu. Included in the standard CAWF distribution is the
C source code, the executable programs for DOS and the MAC OS, and the
macro and device definition files. The program also compiles cleanly
with gcc 2.7.2 under Linux.
CAWF, like the UNIX nroff, excels in formatting documents written for
monospaced character devices like generic PC-compatible displays and
UNIX ttys. UNIX systems tend to store man page documentation in
source form, formatting the pages on demand. This can save a lot of
space and effort on UNIX systems, but it can be a problem when using
UNIX-type software on a PC or compatibles. UNIX troff source is
nearly impossible to read without a lot of experience. Fortunately,
it's easy to use CAWF to make a man page browser that works under DOS
and formats genuine UNIX man pages.
The first thing you need to acquire is the CAWF archive itself, and
the DOS version of less, the Free Software Foundation's pager program.
The two archives, named cawf.zip and less177.zip, are available from
DOS-GNU archives like ftp:wuarchive.wustl.edu/systems/ibmpc/gnuish.
To install CAWF, place the cawf.exe and bsfilt.exe files in a
directory somewhere along your search path. Here, it is located
in c:\bin\cawf.exe. The files common, device.cf, dumb.dev, man.mac,
ms.mac, and me.mac, go in the directory c:\lib\cawf. The canonical
UNIX location for troff macros is lib/tmac, but we'll keep everything
here in one place, for reasons of simplicity. Set the environment
variable CAWFLIB to this directory; e.g.,
set CAWFLIB=c:\lib\cawf
so the program knows where to find these files. They define output
devices available on your system, common macros, and the macro
packages themselves.
The files cawf.1 and bsfilt.1 go in a directory \man\man1. Also make
the directories \man\man2 ... \man\man9 and \man\mann. This is the
directory structure of a UNIX man page library. Also make the
directories \man\cat1... \man\cat9, and \man\catn. The latter
directories are used to store already-formatted man pages.
To install less, move the less.exe and lesskey.exe executables to a
directory in your search path, probably the same one where cawf.exe
and bsfilt.exe are. Place the files less.hlp and termcap.dat in the
directory \lib. Move the less.nro file to \man\man1\less.1. Do the
same with the lesskey.nro file, moving it to \man\man1\lesskey.1.
Less has many options. Even for this simple application, less needs
three environment variables set. TERM tells less which termcap entry
to use for your video display. Setting TERM=ansi or TERM=mono should
work for most PC displays. LESSHELP tells less the name of its help
file. In this instance, you should set LESSHELP=c:\lib\less.hlp. The
variable LESS tells less.exe what standard options to use on startup.
Setting LESS=-Cmd provides the most UNIX-like behavior. Take a look
at the less(1) manual page for further options.
The man program is a straightforward DOS batch file. Simply cut and
paste this into a file called man.bat somewhere along the path. Note
the comments where you need to set the directory location of you man
library.
: Man.bat
: Looks first in the catx directories, which has already-
: formatted pages and can simply be viewed with less(1).
: Then we look in the manx directories for man page sources
: which need formatting.
@echo off
: ==========================================================
: IMPORTANT:
: Replace the following line with full path of the parent
: man page directory; e.g., c:\man
set MANPATH=c:\man
: ==========================================================
set MANFILE=
if %1!==! goto oops
: first, we search the catx directories...
if exist %MANPATH%\cat1\%1.1 less %MANPATH%\cat1\%1.1
if exist %MANPATH%\cat2\%1.2 less %MANPATH%\cat2\%1.2
if exist %MANPATH%\cat3\%1.3 less %MANPATH%\cat3\%1.3
if exist %MANPATH%\cat4\%1.4 less %MANPATH%\cat4\%1.4
if exist %MANPATH%\cat5\%1.5 less %MANPATH%\cat5\%1.5
if exist %MANPATH%\cat6\%1.6 less %MANPATH%\cat6\%1.6
if exist %MANPATH%\cat7\%1.7 less %MANPATH%\cat7\%1.7
if exist %MANPATH%\cat8\%1.8 less %MANPATH%\cat8\%1.8
if exist %MANPATH%\cat9\%1.9 less %MANPATH%\cat9\%1.9
if exist %MANPATH%\catn\%1.n less %MANPATH%\catn\%1.n
: then we search the manx directories.
if exist %MANPATH%\man1\%1.1 set MANFILE=%MANPATH%\man1\%1.1
if exist %MANPATH%\man2\%1.2 set MANFILE=%MANPATH%\man2\%1.2
if exist %MANPATH%\man3\%1.3 set MANFILE=%MANPATH%\man3\%1.3
if exist %MANPATH%\man4\%1.4 set MANFILE=%MANPATH%\man4\%1.4
if exist %MANPATH%\man5\%1.5 set MANFILE=%MANPATH%\man5\%1.5
if exist %MANPATH%\man6\%1.6 set MANFILE=%MANPATH%\man6\%1.6
if exist %MANPATH%\man7\%1.7 set MANFILE=%MANPATH%\man7\%1.7
if exist %MANPATH%\man8\%1.8 set MANFILE=%MANPATH%\man8\%1.8
if exist %MANPATH%\man9\%1.9 set MANFILE=%MANPATH%\man9\%1.9
if exist %MANPATH%\mann\%1.n set MANFILE=%MANPATH%\mann\%1.n
if %MANFILE%!==! goto file-not-found
cawf -man %MANFILE% | less
goto end
:oops
echo Usage: MAN program-name
goto end
:file-not-found
echo Man file not found!
: fall through
:end
The usual caveats about backing up any files you edit, directories you
make, etc. apply here, as with any new installation. Also the usual
disclaimers about usability of software for a particular purpose.
This is not guaranteed to work, but is a starting point for your own
manual page system.
Man pages are stored by section and format. Already formatted pages,
again, are placed in the cat directories. Their grouping follows
the man directories. By convention, man page sections are grouped:
man1 -- User programs.
man2 -- Unix system calls.
man3 -- Programming libraries.
man4 -- Device node files.
man5 -- System configuration file formats
man6 -- Games.
man7 -- Macro file formats.
man8 -- Daemons and related.
man9 -- Local system calls.
mann -- Miscellaneous.
Several improvements that can be made to the man program are: 1) place
formatted man pages automatically in the catx directories to be
reused, and 2) allow for gzipped man pages, uncompressing and
formatting them on demand.
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Expanded-memory teTeX binaries released.
In the last IMPRINT, I mentioned one cause of memory error messages in
TeX programs based on the Web2c sources. These programs are
particular about the way which lines of input text are terminated.
For a further explanation, take a look at IMPRINT Vol. 1 No. 2.
That category of software includes teTeX. There are certainly other,
more serious reasons why a TeX program would run out of memory, and
the causes may be difficult or impossible to correct. The input
document may simply be too large for the programs' internal symbol
tables, for example. Ivo Welch, ivo.welch@anderson.ucla.edu, and
Thomas Esser, te@informatik.uni-hannover.de, have provided
expanded-memory virtex and initex executables, which, according to
Ivo, should eliminate the "...memory exceeded at 262..." bytes errors.
These binaries are entirely unsupported. They are configured for the
standard teTeX directory structure and are available at:
http://linux.anderson.ucla.edu/tetex-large.tar.gz.
I haven't taken a look at the binaries. But if anyone has experience
with teTeX memory hangups, and their solutions, please drop me a line
here.
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New, improved Linux/teTeX guide available.
Moderately justifiable self-promotion is standard in this business.
So, if I may say so, the new Linux/teTeX Local Guide, written by yours
truly and published by the Linux Documentation Project, is
significantly bigger and better than the previous version.
The Local Guide follows the steps necessary to get teTeX running at
your Linux site, from the initial installation to integrating Type 1
fonts with teTeX. Also known to Linux Activists as the TeTeX-HOWTO,
the Local Guide covers a step-by-step installation of teTeX under
Linux, and lists, Whole-Earth style, resources for beginning and
advanced TeX users, including, of course, this newsletter.
The Local Guide is available at your nearest sunsite.unc.edu mirror,
as ~Linux/docs/LDP/HOWTO/TeTeX-HOWTO. To provide the author with
feedback, hints, criticism, errata, fan mail, and so forth, send
e-mail to me at Robert_A._Kiesling@macline.com.
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IMPRINT is copyright (c) 1997 by Robert A. Kiesling and its
individual contributors. IMPRINT may not be reproduced in any
way without the express consent of its contributors. Individual
stories are copyrighted by their respective authors, and the
copyright of each story reverts to the author after inclusion
in IMPRINT.
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