PSROFF

Section: User Commands (1)
Updated: local
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NAME

psroff,ljroff,xxroff - troff replacement for PostScript or HP Printers.

SYNOPSIS

xxroff [-D] [-X] [-dxx] [-rLlength] [troffopts]files...

DESCRIPTION

Psroff is functionally equivalent for troff for printing on PostScript or HP Laserjet printers. Troffopts can be any of the normal troff arguments, in particular -m directives for specifying macro package. Note that the semantics of "-t" are changed - it means send the Postscript (or HP Laserjet) output to stdout. The "-X" option does a "set -x" for debugging. The "-D" option passes the "-D" option through to troff2ps. Psroff can be made to generate several different printer output formats. It selects which one by one of two methods. First, psroff looks at the first two characters in it's name for printer type. Thus, you can link "psroff" to "ljroff" - invocation of the latter will generate LaserJet codes. Additionally, you can override this by specifying the -dxx option, where xx will select which printer codes to generate. Psroff invokes troff to do the document formatting, then sends the output to troff2ps to do the generation of the correct printer codes. Since troff2ps requires that it knows the page length, the "-rL" option should be used (see the documentation for MM and troff2ps for more details).

BUGS

Old-fashioned CAT troff doesn't have a mechanism for passing arbitrary commands to the CAT - eg: overlays, and physical font mounting etc. In order to support these things, a macro ".sR" was invented that passes special directives to the back end by means of a magic pseudo CAT code 'M', followed by an ASCII string containing the directive. Unfortunately, the only way to get that to the back end from troff that I have found so far is to embed the 'M<string>' in a ``.tm'' troff directive. The ``.tm'' puts it's string to stderr, so psroff has been modified to merge the stdout (CAT codes using -t option to troff) and stderr (.tm directives) together. Unfortunately, this means that you don't get to see troff-generated errors except as "illegal flash" errors from troff2ps, or varying degrees of extreme garbage on the printer. If you encounter mangled output, try running troff instead of psroff, with the ``-t'' option, and direct stdout to /dev/null. Then you will see troff's stderr.

AUTHOR

Written by Chris Lewis

This document was created by man2html, using the manual pages.
Time: 06:15:27 GMT, December 12, 2024