Re: Re: Heirloom Troff for NetBSD (was: Removing ARCNET stuffs)

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

> ([...]; or setting the space as a true character as \obeyspaces
> does---but I have to verify that tokenization and hyphenation still
> work in this case).

Tokenization should work as normal; space becomes active instead of
whitespace, but it still terminates other tokens.  Hyphenation should
work normally, since IIRC it is driven off the typeset characters,
rather than the input characters.  You just need to make sure your
words don't have interspersed glue, but interword spacing _is_ glue;
while I'd need to drag out the TeXBook to be sure, I think that's all
that's necessary.

>>> This can be derived from dvitype(1).
>> dvitype is a relatively poor starting point; it works well enough
>> for purposes that can tolerate suboptimal output [...]
> What I mean is that the dvi format handling is sketched in the
> dvitype(1) WEB program.  So one can start from this dvi program for
> deriving another dvi treatment program

Ah!  Yes, I agree.  Back in the '80s when I was at a lab that actually
used TeX routinely and we had a then-newfangled laser printer, an LN01
(a big clunker that IIRC was something like three by four by four
feet), I built a DVI-to-LN01 program, and I concur: DVI readers are not
particularly difficult.  (The issues with the LN01 program were on the
LN01 side, not the DVI side.)

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