Re: lynx-dev LYNX: P(rint) removes "underlines"

[Klaus Weide]

On Fri, 29 Jan 1999, Bela Lubkin wrote:
> Doug Kaufman wrote:
> > On Fri, 29 Jan 1999 address@hidden wrote:
> > 
> > > this isn't a change - 'print' doesn't do underlines since it (like the 
> > > dump
> > > option) just saves the text as is.
> > 
> > SUBSTITUTE_UNDERSCORES in lynx.cfg or -underscore on the command line
> > does this for -dump output, but not for print output. I think the
> > optimal behavior would be for the underscore option to apply to print
> > output also. Since it doesn't, I assume that there was a reason. What is
> > the downside to having the option for underscores printing apply to
> > print output also? Is it that print can be configured to do whatever you
> > want with the rendered output, so that the underscores would interfere
> > with whatever process was called?

I can also only speculate, but Doug's speculation makes sense to me...

> I've long wished that `lynx -dump` could optionally output hardcopy
> printer style highlighting: "boldface" of x^Hx and "underscore" of _^Hx.
> This would allow pagers like `less` to display those highlights (and, of
> course, for printers to print them).  The same could apply to print
> output.

I have sometimes wished for kind of the opposite: that lynx could
interpret x^Hx and _^Hx (at least in text/plain documents) and
translate that to its internal representation for bold/underlined.
Say for formatted man pages, or for /usr/doc/sendmail/op.txt.gz
which I only have in that form and postscript.

Well I haven't wished for it enough to do anything about it (and lynx
is not meant to be a file viewer...).  Resorted to hacking up some
perl script to generate minimal HTML from those files.

> Hmmm, looks like that wouldn't be too difficult in GridText.c...

Would be even simpler if it just had to output "boldface on" and
"boldface off" etc. escape sequences - you could still tranform
that to x^Hx for each character externally if you need to.  Actually
I'd prefer that; it seems less of a pain to deal with, and could
more easily be generlaized to also apply to character style colors.

  Klaus