The ECN No Name Newsletter is no longer being published. This is an archived issue.
[previous article]As the demise of X10 is drawing ever nearer, many of you are converting to X11. With the conversion you may notice that the troff previewer, xproof, does not exist for X11. When the ECN was evaluating troff previewers, another program, preview, was deemed to be far superior than the other troff previewers available. Although preview is easy to use, there are a few things that need to be done before you can begin using it.
First add the directory /usr/andrew/bin to your path. In your ~/.X11startup (near the top) add the line "$ xset fp+ /usr/andrew/X11fonts". At this point you need to inform the X11 server of the change in the font path. You can either quit X11 and restart, or execute the command, "$ xset fp+ /usr/andrew/X11fonts" from the shell prompt.
To view troff output, you can either pipe the troff output into preview "$ troff -Tpsc -mm filename | preview", or you can redirect the output from troff into another file with "$ troff -Tpsc -mm inputfile > outputfile" and then give preview the name of the output file "$ preview outputfile".
When preview first displays your output, it uses "scaled mode." That is, one page of your output is scaled down to fit into the window. This provides a rough overall look at your output, allowing you to make a quick check to see if your output fits on one page, or if your table worked correctly.
Preview has a second mode, called "full-sized" mode. In full size, the output is the same size as it would appear on the printed page. When using full-sized mode, the window remains the same size, and you must use the scrollbars to view sections of the page not visible.
Selection of the viewing mode, page to view, and other options are made by moving the mouse cursor into the preview window and depressing and holding the center mouse button (button #2). Moving the mouse cursor over the desired selection and releasing the button causes the function associated with the menu selection to be activated.
Currently, preview is only available on the Sun3 architectures, due to hardware dependencies in the software. There are no plans at this time to provide a Sun4 version of preview, although if a hardware independent version becomes available, it will be considered.
HTML