From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: ron@ronnatalie.com (Ronald Natalie) Date: Sun, 27 Sep 2015 12:10:02 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] getting nroff to underline in v6,v5 In-Reply-To: <20150927155118.GC21801@mercury.ccil.org> References: <20150927155118.GC21801@mercury.ccil.org> Message-ID: <6179EB54-7939-4C8C-AB68-61A57FF2EB55@ronnatalie.com> And there were a whole slew of filters like nobsp that either stripped out the over(under?)struck characters or reformatted them so it worked on your lineprinter efficently. I remember the lineprinter we had if you fed it line with a backspace it would print the line up to the backspace and then overstrike it going forward. If you had multiple backspaces (like a whole sentene) the thing stuck there just doing the overstrike. It was more efficient to write a filter that changed the _ BS X for each letter to one line of text, a CR (no LF), and then another line of overstrike. > On Sep 27, 2015, at 11:51 AM, John Cowan wrote: > > Mark Longridge scripsit: > >> Maybe there was the ability to use overstrike characters on the teletype? > > That's inherent in the nature of printing terminals: 'X', BS, '_' worked > fine on all such terminals to produce an underlined X. Later it was > found to be better to use '_', BS, 'X', which looked the same on actual > TTYs or equivalents (LA34/36) and was greatly superior on video terminals. > > -- > John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan at ccil.org > Any sufficiently-complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, > informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. > --Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming (rules 1-9 are unknown) > _______________________________________________ > TUHS mailing list > TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org > https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs