From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <0a0e01c10ba1$256ac900$c0b7c6d4@SOMA> From: "Boyd Roberts" To: <9fans@cse.psu.edu> References: <20010713124934.B1573199E4@mail.cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] how people learn things (was architectures) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 15:38:48 +0200 Topicbox-Message-UUID: ca231274-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 > while(`{read}){ > troff ... |lp -dstdout > x.ps > page x.ps > } i've fought a lot with �sloth's 'wysiwyg' -- it isn't. i find myself in exactly the same loop. i think wordpad is the _worst_ because from what you saw and printed a week ago is no longer the same a week later. given i had all these envelopes with postcode boxes and i had an OCR font i thought i'd make a generic template with wordpad and then have a bunch of files with one address per file and then print them directly on the envelopes. to get the generic templates took _hours of pure hackery_. later, every time i printed an address it was always not where it had been. at least with troff i can say go to (x, y) and put down some chunk of text. yes, i will have to loop a bit, to get the generic, but it _will_ work the next time. they have a copy of the code to word 2 at la cit� des sciences et de la technologie (i think that's it). when i saw it i thought 'bound to be a chunk of os/360', but no, a metre high stack of paper -- 600k lines of code. and _that_ was word 2! i wrote some code to print stuff on '95. really simple (or so you'd think) 4 or 5 columns of text on an A4 page. impossible, absolutely impossible, without writing a huge chunk of code. i cheated.