(more) nroff questions on italics/underscore

[Robert Viduya]

[]

I've been using nroff and working on ways to interface it with a Xerox
9700 laser printer (with bold and italics fonts).  I've discovered a few
things in being able to differentiate between italicized words and under-
lined words.  First off, we are running a Pyramid 90x with both SystemV
and 4.2BSD.  The 4.2 nroff does not overstrike emboldened characters
nor does it do anything to differentiate bold characters from normal
characters.  That led me to use SystemV's nroff, which does overstrike
emboldened characters.  Further investigation showed that SysV nroff
underlined character 'x' with '_^Hx'.  It also treated italicized characters
the same way.  However, using the '-me' macros showed that italicization
was done with '_^Hx' (as before) but that word 'xyz' was underlined as
'xyz^H^H^H___'.  The 'col' command will translate sequences of 'xyz^H^H^H___'
to 'x^H_y^H_z^H_'.  Based on this, I was able to write a filter that
translates sequences of 'x^Hx' into a bold 'x', '_^Hx' into an italicized
'x' and 'x^H_' into an underlined 'x'.  Of course, the output from the
filter is specifically for our Xerox laser printer (in fixed pitch fonts
only, we're hoping to get ditroff to handle proportional fonts).  However,
I'm all in favor of the above becoming some kind of standard as the output
on a standard printer will be identical, yet it gives people who want to
try to interface nroff to a printer with different font capabilities a way
to differentiate italicized words from underlined words.

Question:  Does anyone know why 4.2 nroff does not overstrike characters
that are supposed to be emboldened?

			robert
-- 
Robert Viduya
Office of Computing Services
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta GA 30332
Phone:  (404) 894-4669

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