630 MTG - ditroff previewer

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <336 at hsi86.hsi.UUCP> stevens at hsi.UUCP (Richard Stevens) writes:
>I'm using the "xproof" program from the 630_pkg package ...
>The package works, but the fonts look pretty bad.

Not yet having gotten our 630_pkg acquisition through procurement channels,
I don't know for sure what fonts are provided.  My guess, however, is that
they're essentially the same as the ones in the 5620 DMD text+graphics host
package.  Those were optically scanned from some hardcopy sample of the
fonts, and not manually cleaned up (so, for example, some + signs look like
- signs).  I kludged together enough tools to edit the 10-point Roman font,
which is the default and therefore most commonly used, but it was a lot of
work.  What I really would like is a good DMD/MTG font editor; I'm sure one
exists somewhere.  Anyway, I don't know of any substitute for careful manual
tweaking of fonts, at least not for this resolution.  (For higher resolution
Metafont might be acceptable.)

>I see two ways to use the package.  First, to get something that looks
>pretty good on the screen you'll want to have ditroff use the font
>widths for the actual fonts to be used on the display.

The original notion was that one would use the DMD/MTG to preview output
intended for printing on some other device, typically these days a laser
printer.  The best match to the actual DMD fonts is obtained via troff -Taps.
It wasn't until "loadfont" came along that other uses for fonts other than
defont were really envisioned (apart from specialized cases such as the
Tek4104 emulator).  Most of the newer fonts are specifically constant-width
and are intended for general-purpose (non-troff) use on the DMD/MTG.

>However, I don't see how to do this.

You need an appropriate troff font description file.  Your DWB documentation
should explain this (if you're lucky; otherwise you'll have to figure it out).

>I'll accept this to see exactly what the page layout looks like.

Which is indeed the original motivation for "proof".