Re: Questions about PlainText Documents

[Jeff Kingston]

On Tue, 26 Jun 2001 17:44:22 +0200 (CEST), Meszaros Attila wrote:
  >     
  >     What about introducing at least the following two options?
  >     horizontalruleplainchar { - }
  >     verticalruleplainchar { | }
  >     and possibly 
  >     uperleft, uperright....?
  > 

It should not be hard for someone to modify tblf and tbl to do this.
I'm not sure what would happen at the corners though.

  > > * a possibility to set absolut positions
  >     This third question is still too hard for me.
  >     Can anyone give an advice how to start?
  >

There is the @Place symbol, but I have a horrible feeling that it
does not work with plain text.  More detail on precisely what you
want and why you want it would help.

  > And a new question: even a matrix printer in character mode is able to
  > produce characters in _normal_ and _condensed_ mode. It would enable us
  > to use two different font size optionally in text documents meant to be
  > printed on such a printer. 

I guess you mean plain text output but with two fonts and some kind of
escape sequence to switch between them, embedded in the text.  This
would be very hard to add to the current Lout implementation.  Given
that the two fonts differ in horizontal size I think the only way
would be to use the PostScript back end and post-process the output,
which would be pretty horrible.

Do other word processing systems support this kind of output?

Jeff