Re: [Groff] man problem under non-latin1 locale

[Larry Kollar]

"Stewart C. Russell" wrote:

> >  2. The character used as a bullet ...
> >     (or maybe lowercase "o", possibly overstruck with "+",
> >     like in ascii).
> 
> and you talk about "typographically ugly"? Urk.

I still have some manuals I wrote in nroff (with a seriously
hacked up -ms package). This was around 1984.

Back then, I used lowercase o for a bullet and filled them in
with a marker when it was time to print. In this case, I'd
probably use an asterisk (*) for a bullet because overstriking
and stupid marker tricks won't work on screen.


> Monospaced typography is oxymoronic to me.

In my 1984-vintage manuals, word spacing is noticeably even
line to line. My output device was a NEC Spinwriter, and it
supported fractional horizontal & vertical motions. I wrote
a "driver" (-Tnec) that took advantage of that. This was around 
1984. There was a Times wheel (actually a basket) but I never
finished figuring out the metrics. I seem to remember working
on filling in the gap between '--' to make a solid em dash, but
I'm not sure if I ever got it to work.

I tried to make the manuals look as good as possible given
the limitations of the output device and my own skills of
the time (first job out of college). Knowing what I do now,
I would have used a lot more white space and beat on the
macros some more.

-- 
Larry Kollar   k o l l a r  at  a l l t e l . n e t
"Content creators are the engine that drives value in the
information life cycle."   -- Barry Schaeffer, on XML-Doc