nroff and printing

[Bill Campbell]

On Mon, May 14, 2007, Dennis Malen wrote:
>When passing an nroff file (where the underlying file was created in 
>filepro) off to the printer must I have the printer set to any particular 
>configuration? When passed through to a PCL or ASCII printer, the carriage 
>return does not work. The end of the line is continued at the next column 
>but on the next line down.
>
>I am using the following:
>
>nroff {name of file created by filepro} | lp -d{name of printer} -s
>
>With or without the -s provides the same results.
>
>When the following command is used, it writes it to the screen correctly and 
>the form is perfect:
>
>nroff {name of file created by filepro}|pg
>
>The file is created in filepro processing with the following:
>

Straight nroff output may well contain codes that need to be translated
before going to a printer.  In particular, it probably puts out things like
backspaces on bold text in patterns like character<bs>character<bs>character
which would overprint on a typewriter type device.

Years ago I wrote filters that translate character printer output on the
fly to match specific destination printers (by character printer, I mean
ones that use ascii input with reasonable print codes such as HP, Epson,
Okidata, etc.).

Bill
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