[9fans] Re: psutils et al

["John A. Murdie" <john@cs.york.ac.uk>]

"Douglas A. Gwyn" <gwyn@arl.army.mil> wrote:
>"John A. Murdie" wrote:
>> ... On Unix and Plan 9, I'd say that was probably
>> at the ditroff output level. ...
>
>Unfortunately, troff "knows" physical characteristics of the
>device when it preforms the formatting.  Certainly, ditroff
>output can be manipulated by filters and device interpreters
>(e.g. there is often a "landscape" switch), but the language
>is a little too close to the hardware to expect good results.

Thanks, this is interesting. So, if I am writing an application
program for Plan 9 which requires to print graphical output,
what document description language do I use? I think I'd probably
write pic/eqn/tbl etc. Is that your solution too? Where then
should one do any N-upping, page rotation etc that is required,
given that doing it at the PostScript level invites people similarly
to post-process bad PostScript? What should the Plan 9 solution be?

John A. Murdie
Department of Computer Science
University of York
England