ch43_01.htm

the unix power tools

<A
CLASS="xref"
HREF="ch43_05.htm"
TITLE="Using Symbolic Links for Spooling "
>43.5</A
>,
discuss the basic UNIX spooling system, and how to work
with it as a user.
(We don't discuss the administrative aspects of spooling;
that's a much more complicated topic, and not really appropriate for
this book.)
Article
<A
CLASS="xref"
HREF="ch43_06.htm"
TITLE="Printing to a Terminal Printer "
>43.6</A
>
shows one way to print to a terminal with its own printer.</P
><P
CLASS="para"
>The next few articles talk about how to format articles for printing&nbsp;- not
the kind of fancy formatting people think of nowadays, but simpler things
like pagination, margins, and so on, for text files that are to be sent to
the line printer. Articles
<A
CLASS="xref"
HREF="ch43_07.htm"
TITLE="Quick-and-Dirty Formatting Before Printing "
>43.7</A
>
through
<A
CLASS="xref"
HREF="ch43_10.htm"
TITLE="Filename Headers Above Files Without pr "
>43.10</A
>
describe this kind of simple formatting.</P
><P
CLASS="para"
><A
CLASS="indexterm"
NAME="AUTOID-47385"
></A
><A
CLASS="indexterm"
NAME="AUTOID-47388"
></A
><A
CLASS="indexterm"
NAME="AUTOID-47391"
></A
><A
CLASS="indexterm"
NAME="AUTOID-47393"
></A
>Historical note number two: why is the print spooler called <EM
CLASS="emphasis"
>lp</EM
> or
<EM
CLASS="emphasis"
>lpr</EM
>?
Because it typically spooled text to a line printer, a fast
printer that used a wide head to print an entire line at a time.
These printers are still common in data processing applications, and they
can really fly!</P
><P
CLASS="para"
>In the mid-'70s, lots of UNIX people got excited about typesetting.
Some typesetters were available that could be connected to computers,
most notably the C/A/T phototypesetter.
Programs like <EM
CLASS="emphasis"
>troff</EM
> and
TeX were developed to format texts for phototypesetters: letting
computer people think that, because they could produce fancy output,
they actually had some sense of design.
Most of them didn't; if you
go back to the early days of typesetting, or even of laser printers,
you probably remember lots of incredibly ugly documents masquerading
as &quot;good designs.&quot;
(Gothic fonts on a dot matrix printer?
Get real.)
But that's another story.
Tools like <EM
CLASS="emphasis"
>troff</EM
>,
<EM
CLASS="emphasis"
>nroff</EM
> (a <EM
CLASS="emphasis"
>troff</EM
> equivalent that produces output for a
standard terminal), and TeX are still with us, and still very
valuable.
They're discussed in articles
<A
CLASS="xref"
HREF="ch43_12.htm"
TITLE="Typesetting Overview "
>43.12</A
>
through
<A
CLASS="xref"
HREF="ch43_21.htm"
TITLE="Preprocessing troff Input with sed "
>43.21</A
>.</P
><P
CLASS="para"
><A
CLASS="indexterm"
NAME="AUTOID-47405"
></A
>Laser printers became commonplace in the mid-80s, allowing common
people to do high-quality printing: almost as good (but not quite) as
true typesetting.
With laser printers came a widely used standard
language, called PostScript, to drive the printer.
Tools like
<EM
CLASS="emphasis"
>troff</EM
> and TeX now generated PostScript output files, which could
be printed on any printer that understood the PostScript language.
This was a big advantage: if you bought a new printer, you didn't have
to change your software; you could ship a PostScript file
cross-country and be reasonably sure the recipient could print it
correctly.
[1]
However, another problem appeared.
PostScript is a complicated
language; things that were easy with a simple text file were now
rather difficult.
You can't just type up a letter and send it to your 
daisy wheel printer; you need to convert it into PostScript.
It used to be easy to print &quot;just a
few pages&quot; from the middle of a file, <EM
CLASS="emphasis"
>grep</EM
> through a file to
find something interesting, or to look at the file on your
screen and read it.
Not any more.
We've 
ended this chapter with a few utilities for
working with PostScript files.
Unfortunately, not enough; I played
with lots of them, and while there were some winners, there were many
more losers: programs that worked sometimes but not most of the time.
The winners are discussed in articles
<A
CLASS="xref"
HREF="ch43_22.htm"
TITLE="Converting Text Files to PostScript "
>43.22</A
>,
<A
CLASS="xref"
HREF="ch43_23.htm"
TITLE="psselect: Print Some Pages from a PostScript file"
>43.23</A
>,
and
<A
CLASS="xref"
HREF="ch43_24.htm"
TITLE="Other PostScript Utilities "
>43.24</A
>.</P
><BLOCKQUOTE
CLASS="footnote"
><P
CLASS="para"
>[1] Documents were reasonably &quot;portable&quot; back in the line-printer era.
Portability disappeared in the early days of computer typesetting, and
only reappeared when PostScript became the dominant page description
language.
[PostScript doesn't help someone who doesn't have the exact fonts
used in the PostScript file&nbsp;- unless the person who created the file
included the fonts in it. <EM
CLASS="emphasis"
>-JP</EM
>&nbsp;]</P
></BLOCKQUOTE
><P
CLASS="para"
>Finally, article
<A
CLASS="xref"
HREF="ch43_25.htm"
TITLE="The Portable Bitmap Package "
>43.25</A
>
is about the <EM
CLASS="emphasis"
>netpbm</EM
> package.
It's a useful tool for people who deal with graphics files.
<EM
CLASS="emphasis"
>netpbm</EM
> converts between different graphics formats.<A
CLASS="indexterm"
NAME="AUTOID-47421"
></A
><A
CLASS="indexterm"
NAME="AUTOID-47422"
></A
></P
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