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Re: [Groff] offset scaling with .bd
From: |
Ralph Corderoy |
Subject: |
Re: [Groff] offset scaling with .bd |
Date: |
Tue, 05 Nov 2002 09:15:04 +0000 |
Hi Dan,
> The original troff reference manual mumbles something like:
>
> .bd F N "The characters in font F will be artificially
> emboldened by printing each one twice, separated by N-1
> basic units. A reasonable value for N is 3 when the charater
> size is in the vicinity of 10 points..."
And in the front reference pages lists it as `.bd S F N', which is
wrong.
> However, unless I use values for N of the order of a few hundreds
> (e.g. 600) the emboldening is negligible. The gnu groff manual
> mentions something about .bd that I don't understand if has any
> relevance to this problem. Perhaps someone can educate me on how the
> scaling of the offset in the .bd command works.
As Kernighan says, N's default unit is the `basic unit' as opposed to
inches, points, etc. The size of a basic unit differs between output
devices. There's 72000 basic units to the inch when talking about
grops, so 3 won't go very far. Presumably, 3 was sufficient for
Kernighan's environment.
You can specify a unit, e.g. `.bd R 1p', so it's independent of the
output device. Or use something that returns a basic unit, e.g. `.bd R
\w'x''.
If I haven't made this clear, I've never used it, ask again and someone
on the list will put me right.
Cheers,
Ralph.