Date: Thu, 22 May 1997 21:18:51 -0700 (PDT) From: Annelise Anderson <andrsn@andrsn.stanford.edu> To: Thomas David Rivers <ponds!rivers@dg-rtp.dg.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: RE: manual Message-ID: <Pine.BSI.3.94.970522211023.18722B-100000@andrsn.stanford.edu> In-Reply-To: <199705221410.KAA02651@lakes.water.net>
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On Thu, 22 May 1997, Thomas David Rivers wrote: [snip] > > > There is an ascii, html, latin1, PostScript and ln (?) version of the handbook > > > and the FAQ... > > > > Actually the "ascii" isn't really plain text....here are a few lines.. > > > > Welcome to FreeBSD! This handbook covers the installation and day to > > day use of FFrreeeeBBSSDD RReelleeaassee 22..22..22. This manual is a wwoo > > rrkk iinn pprrooggrreessss > > Usually, that's a symptom of removing the back-spaces that were > used for overstriking. Overstriking is how you get older printers > to do "bold." i.e. print a character, back-up and print it again. > > You may be using an editor that doesn't recognize the back spaces. > > If you want to intelligently clean this up before examining it; > take the original file and pass it through "col" with the -b option.. > > e.g.: > cat foo | col -b > bar > > then you can examine the result... the overstriking will be removed. > [See the col man page for more information.] > > - Dave Rivers - Actually the version downloaded from ftp.freebsd.org has, I think, already had the ^H characters removed. So col -b won't work on it. The point is that the handbook ought to be available in a form that doesn't require this kind of processing. It seems that if you want a really readable version, you need to get the postscript version, convert it to ascii and run it through col -b, then use fmt on it, and then (if you've got a display that isn't using the iso-8859-1 character set), do some substitutions on it so that hyphens don't look like upside-down exclamation points. Now isn't that a little much to ask? Annelise > > >
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