Date: Sun, 22 Jun 1997 20:15:29 -0700 (PDT) From: Joseph Stein <joes@spiritone.com> To: andrsn@andrsn.stanford.edu (Annelise Anderson) Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Handbook - ascii form?? Message-ID: <199706230315.UAA05119@joes.users.spiritone.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSI.3.94.970622190310.18039A-100000@andrsn.stanford.edu> from Annelise Anderson at "Jun 22, 97 07:23:43 pm"
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> FFrreeeeBBSSDD HHaannddbbooookk which is exactly what will happen on a non-conforming printer that does not understand how to interpret a 'DEL' character (ascii 008 or ^H) > The various suggestions to repair this text, such as piping it through > col -b, running little sed scripts, and so forth are inappropriate from > the point of view that this document (and the FAQ, which has the same > problems) are supposed to be useful to people running dos/Windows as well > as people who may not yet be familiar with various Unix utilities. But, have you tried those suggestions? Try outputting the file to a line printer and see if your results are any better. These files ARE straight ascii text. They are designed for overstrike to emphasize certain portions or underline them without using printer-specific control characters. Laser-jet printers (in my opinion) are notorious for not interpreting ASCII 008 correctly. > But these suggestions also seem to be in error, because the down-loaded > handbook.ascii doesn't have any ^H codes or any other codes in it; it's > what I would call hard-coded just as it appears above. Doing > substitutions for ^H or running it though col -b have no effect on it > whatsoever. Yes, they do... > Thus, the code that generates handbook.ascii is broken, right? No. The code that generates the files is one hundred percent okay. It's flaky hardware (or in the case of Micro$loth, buggy software).
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