discuss: linuxdoc text backend
Subject:
Re: [discuss] linuxdoc text backend
From:
David Lawyer ####@####.####
Date:
17 Oct 2005 22:26:46 -0000
Message-Id: <20051017222703.GA2380@lafn.org>
> >
> > I'm curious about the state of the script generated text documents,
> >
> > which have embedded special characters.
>
>
On Mon, Oct 17, 2005 at 05:52:08AM -0700, ####@####.#### wrote:
> sgml2html -c ascii <file>
> is how the script does it (for linuxdoc)
You must mean sgml2txt -c latin -f
This doesn't eliminate the escape sequences on my PC using
linuxdoc-tools 0.9.21. Perhaps LDP is using an earlier version of
linuxdoc or groff-grotty?
But in the meantime, I did find out how to pass the -c flag to grotty
to eliminate the escape sequences. It turned out to be in the man
page for groff, but the info doc that I used leads one to a blank
section. In /usr/bin/linuxdoc change the definition of GROFF to
"...groff -P-c". In other words, append the option -P-c. This passes
-c to grotty.
Or you can do this without patching the binary (bin) by:
sgml2txt --pass="-P-c"
This passes -P-c to groff which in turn passes -c to grotty. But to
eliminate the overstrikes, give the -b option to grotty also:
sgml2txt --pass="-P-bc"
Another way of eliminating overstrikes is to use the -f flag to
sgml2txt as was done in the LDP script. -b is more efficient since I
suspect that otherwise the overstrikes are generated and then filtered
out.
Overstriking was used by the old unix text processing system which
used real teletypes (tty) or the like (hard copy terminals). If the
tty (like an impact printer) hit the paper with a letter key and then
backspaced and hit with the same key again, this is overstriking.
Hitting it twice put more ink on the paper and made it look bolder.
But it doesn't work with modern terminals using an electronic display.
So should the default for groff be just plain text output with neither
escape sequences for dumb electronic terminals nor overstrikes for
hard-copy terminals (which are now museum pieces)? So perhaps the fix
is for someone to patch groff instead of linuxdoc.
David Lawyer
