I M P R I N T The Newsletter of Digital Typography Vol. 1, No. 8 Aug. 25, 1997 Contents copyright (c) 1997 by Robert A. Kiesling and the contributors of IMPRINT. All rights reserved. To subscribe, send news, or comment, email to: imprint@macline.com In this issue: How to install and use RCS with MS-DOS, the easy way. ACM opens its Digital Library to the public. Overpic style gives you the tools to format LaTeX legends. UNIX utilities for Adobe Multiple Master Fonts. SGML Web Page is a comprehensive guide to markup languages. Smoothtype upgrade moves toward Mac respectability. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From the editor: alt.etext FAQ's early unveiling. For those of us to whom computer-screen phosphor is as much of a medium as printer's ink, a draft alt.etext FAQ, by Jorn Barger, is available on the Web. The document still has rough spots, but it contains useful links to etext resources theoretical, historical, and practical. The brave-new-medium feel of the FAQ is overly MacLuhan-ish, especially in the first section, which is a narrative history of etext. It gives the document the feel of a term paper. The wooly, out-of-control sense may be due actually to the paucity of "experts" of etext, relative to its ubiquity as the communication medium of choice for an emerging subculture. New technology often takes several decades to mature, even longer for the cultural implications to be understood. One need only remember that Ted Nelson penned his description of hypertext in the 1960s, but it still took thirty years before the World Wide Web was realized. In the meantime, as Barger points out, etext critics can agree on one standard, the 80-character wide display, which is what gives this medium its universal appeal. The draft alt.etext FAQ's URL is http://www.msc.net/~jorn/html/net/etextfaq.html Robert Kiesling Editor, Imprint . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How to install and use RCS with MS-DOS, the easy way. The latest in IMPRINT's semi-official DOS/UNIX (DuNIX) series covers RCS, the Revision Control System, perhaps the easiest of those hairy, ugly UNIX packages that even UNIX admins hesitate to mess with. RCS tracks document revisions, plain and simple. Those documents can be text files, source code modules, or configuration files. The suite of RCS utilities takes care of mundane document management chores which most text editors (and word processors) omit. If you have more than a half-dozen text files on your hard drive, RCS is probably worth the effort to install. It's like having a librarian for your documents. Even better, for DOS users, RCS' utilities are compact enough to run in Real Mode, so you don't have to mess with high-memory headroom. The utilities are small enough that they can be run easily in a sub-shell. And RCS is free. So, what are you waiting for? You'll need at least two separate archive files which comprise the RCS package itself. The diff utilities, which RCS uses to track the changes between document revisions, are available separately as well. First, FTP to wuarchive.wustl.edu, and then cd to systems/ibmpc/gnuish/. The RCS archive files are rcs57pc1.zip rcs57pc2.zip The diff utilities are included in the RCS archives, and also stored separately as dos_only/diff23x.zip You'll also need an archive program, like PKUNZIP, which knows how to decompress DOS-format ZIP archives. If you don't have such a utility already, a public domain version is available in the same location, as dos_only/unzi512x.exe The only caveat to unpacking the archives is to use the -d command line option with PKUNZIP, so that the archive's subdirectories are re-created as they're unpacked. This is the default behavior with the public-domain unzi512x.exe, so you only need to specify the archive name that you're uncompressing. You will need about 7.5 MB of disk space for the installation. This is because the distributions contain not only the C source files for RCS and the diff utilities (you don't need to keep them on your hard drive unless you plan to recompile the executables), but also executables that have been compiled for Windows 95/NT, OS/2 16- and 32-bit, and DOS real mode, all in their separate subdirectories. You need the executables from only one of the subdirectories, depending on the type of DOS system you're using. Whatever variety of DOS you have, the executables, and the tasks they perform, are: rcs.exe -- maintain RCS archive. ci.exe -- check file into the archive. cii.exe -- recursively check in directories. co.exe -- check file out of archive. coo.exe -- recursively check out directories. cio.exe -- perform check in/check out as one operation. diff.exe -- generate a list of changes between two files. diff3.exe -- generate a list of changes between three files. ident.exe -- search RCS database by keyword. merge.exe -- merge the changes of two files into a third. rcsclean.exe -- remove unchanged files. rcsdiff.exe -- run diff to compare files. rcsmerge.exe -- merge one or two revised files into working file. rlog.exe -- print log messages and revision information. Each of the executables has a corresponding manual page, preformatted, as well as a PostScript-formatted page. They're located in the doc subdirectory. For a general overview of RCS, see the doc/rcsintro.man manual page. For an overview of how to format and store manual pages on DOS systems, see IMPRINT Vol. 1, No. 3. If you haven't done so already, BACK UP your working directories. RCS deletes and writes files as it moves them to and from archives, and you will want to have a copy of the original documents if something goes wrong. To install the software, copy one set of the DOS, Windows, or OS/2 executables to your hard drive's \dos subdirectory, or whatever subdirectory executables are stored on your system. After you've done that, all of the extraneous executables from the RCS distribution can be discarded. They're only there because the distribution needs to provide executables for all of the possible DOS memory variations. Once you've decided which executable set works with your system, stay with that. Actually, any directory will work to store the executables, as long as it's on your search path. The ASCII manual pages (in the doc directory with the extension "man") should go in a directory where they're readily accessible. You can either print out the manual pages, or not, but the PostScript pages are redundant. You won't need them if you have the ASCII pages handy. If you have the separate diff distribution, copy the executables diff, diff3, and cmp from the diff distribution to the same directory as the RCS executables. diff.man, diff3.man, and cmp.man can go in the same convenient subdirectory as the RCS manual pages. Per the instructions in the DOS distribution's README file, you need to set the environment variables: LOGNAME is the name you want the revisions logged to, TZ is your time zone in UNIX format, and TMP is the directory RCS should use to store its temporary files. RCS uses the settings of several other environment variables if they've been set. Again, see the README file. The USERNAME variable should be whatever your name is on the system (Use your last name if you're on a solitary machine; on a network, RCS can also use the contents of the LOGNAME variable.) If a USERNAME isn't set already, add a line like > set LOGNAME=smith to your machine's AUTOEXEC.BAT file, substituting, of course, the name you want to appear in the RCS logs. The TZ variable's format is probably foreign to most DOS users, because it follows UNIX conventions. One of these time zone settings should be appropriate for your location. > set TZ=EST5EDT : US Eastern Standard Time > set TZ=CST6CDT : US Central Standard Time > set TZ=MST7MDT : US Mountain Standard Time > set TZ=PST8PDT : US Pacific Standard Time > set TZ=GMT0 : Greenwich Mean Time > set TZ=CET-1 : Central European Time Finally, set the TMP variable to whatever directory you want RCS's temporary files to be stored in. For example, > set TMP=C:\TMP if you have a directory C:\TMP on your hard drive. To store the temporary files in the current directory, use > set TMP=.\ There are other, optional environment variables which RCS recognizes. They're listed in the README file. It remains to set up the RCS archives for your individual work files. By default, RCS tries to create an archive in the subdirectory .\rcs, which you should create in the document's work directory with the command > mkdir rcs Then, the command > rcs -i termpapr.txt will create the archive rcs\termpapr.txt. This is not the same as the working file. Instead, it is the still-empty archive file for your revisions, waiting for you to check your revisions into it. You'll be asked for a description of the archive. To check in the initial version of your document, you would give the command > ci termpapr.txt ci will not prompt log file description when checking in the initial revision, but it will on each subsequent revision. You will notice that your file is no longer in the working directory. Instead, it has been checked into the RCS archive. To check out the most recent revision, use the command > co termpapr.txt The command cio combines these operations. At some point, if you want to review the revision log file, this can be done with the command > rlog termpapr.txt That covers the basic operation of RCS. There are a lot more features, like locking (which is not as important on a single-user system like DOS as on, say UNIX or a network), branching and merging, and searching the RCS archive by keyword. To include, for example, the time and date the revision was checked out of the archive, as well as other information, include the string "$Id$" in the document, with the dollar signs but without the quotes. The $Id$ keyword will be expanded by co when you check the file out of the archive. There are about a dozen pre-defined keywords that RCS recognizes. You can also define your own keywords. See the ident.man documentation file for details. RCS also forces you to think about the structure of your directories and revisions, in order to build a meaningful database of revisions. You'll find yourself saving more revisions, because the old versions of files don't take up as much space as the files themselves (only the changes between revisions are recorded), and the old document revisions are less intrusive, being contained as they are in a single archive file per document. Again, it bears repeating that you should have a complete backup of your documents before you begin, in case of a misstep. Soon, though, if you cope with large amounts of text, as I do, you may find that RCS use becomes second natures, and checking files in and out becomes as natural as loading and saving them. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ACM opens its Digital Library to the public. From now until September 30, the Association of Computing Machinery's Digital Library is open to the public. This means that you can browse both the contents of ACM proceedings and download the full text of the articles in PDF format. The library also has indexes of other periodicals related to computing. The URL is http://www.acm.org/dl/. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Overpic package gives you the tools to format LaTeX legends. The overpic LaTeX package has been upgraded by its author, Rolf Niepraschk, niepraschk@pcb.de. Placing the command \usepackage{overpic} in the document preamble provides the overpic environment, which enhances the LaTeX \includegraphics{} command to automatically dimension the environment to the size of an included EPS graphic. The packages also adds a command to place a positioning grid over the graphic, and a \put{} command, which allows the positioning of other elements, like text or another graphic, within the environment's boundaries. The file overpic.sty and related files are available from a CTAN archive site, in the directory macros/latex/contrib/supported/overpic/. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . UNIX utilities for Adobe Multiple Master Fonts. Preliminary versions of two free UNIX command-line tools, written by Eddie Kohler, are available for working with fonts in Adobe's Multiple Master format. mmafm creates a AFM file by interpolating at a given point in a Multiple Master Font's design space. mmpfb creates a PFB font by interpolating at a given point in a Multiple Master Font's design space. Both can handle fonts with intermediate masters, like Adobe Jenson. Both utilities require a C++ compiler -- g++-2.7.2 was used to develop the utilities -- but not the C++ libraries. Version 0.2 corrects a bug in previous versions. Source code for the utilities is located at http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/~eddietwo/type/mmafm-0.2.tar.gz http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/~eddietwo/type/mmpfb-0.2.tar.gz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . SGML Web Page is a comprehensive guide to markup languages. If you have trouble telling an entity from an identity, or if you need to find, say, Oracle DBMS tools that support SGML, then visit the SGML Web Page. by Robin Cover. The SGML Web Page attempts to provide a comprehensive set of links to both beginning and advanced documents related to SGML. Documents available on the web page include, for example, "A Gentle Introduction to SGML" by the Text Encoding Initiative; ISO standards for various markup languages; and academic, commercial, and technical literature. The SGML Web Page provides a reference collection of 1,900 documents and a annotated database of 1,600 citations. There are also current listings of public-domain and commercial SGML software and resources; academic and commercial products which use SGML; and guides to related markup languages like DSSL and XML. The SGML Web Page's URL is http://www.sil.org/sgml/sgml.html . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Smoothtype upgrade moves toward Mac respectability. Smoothtype, which was announced in a previous incarnation here (Vol. 1, No. 3, has moved from a utility that seemed barely out of beta testing to something like respectability with its latest upgrade to version 1.3. There's something about the shareware utility, however, that will always cause it to seem slightly less that legitimate. The Macintosh system extension seems too good to be true. It makes your screen look as good as a printed page, by smoothing font shapes with the same rendering techniques that many laser printers use. The effect is so stunning, even on my 16-shade, gray-scale monitor, that if (as I said in the original review) I could duplicate the exact, yellow color of a 3M PostIt Note, I would be tempted to take a ball-point pen to my Stickies. If you stare at a Mac screen for long periods of time, you need this utility. Smoothtype 1.3 is available from http://greg.math.harvard.edu/ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . To SUBSCRIBE or UNSUBSCRIBE to IMPRINT, send a brief, human- readable message to imprint@macline.com. Back issues of IMPRINT are available via anonymous FTP from the Etext Archives: ftp://ftp.etext.org/pub/Zines/IMPRINT/ via the World Wide Web: http://www.etext.org/pub/Zines/IMPRINT/ http://www.tesre.bo.cnr.it/Services/Local/IMPRINT/ http://www.terracom.net/~kiesling and can be requested via e-mail from: imprint@macline.com IMPRINT: The Newsletter of Digital Typography, ISSN 1094-8090, Madison, Wi., is copyright (c) 1997 by Robert A. Kiesling and its individual contributors. IMPRINT may be reproduced in its entirety for distribution by electronic media, provided that no fee is charged for the newsletter. Individual stories are copyrighted by their authors. Registered trademarks are the property of their respective holders. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .