Session 11

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Session 11: DVI files

Hi. This is session number… 11. (Take a deep breath.)

File extension: ERR -> LOG

Just thinking… this morning after discussion someone said “why do you call it the ERR file? Wouldn't LOG be a much better name?” And absolutely, it’s much better. So it's sold. Our log files are going to be called LOG instead of ERR from now on. There will probably be other things that people who are watching this on videotape some months from today, they’ll probably be having a listing of TeX82 where the module numbers are a little different and there it will say LOG already and they won’t understand what’s going on. I imagine they’ll be able to sort this out, make some sense out of a few of the remarks we make anyway, even though TeX is still absorbing these new ideas. Someday it’ll be too late to absorb any new ideas. So we've got to have all our good ideas very soon. Now… Dan? You've got an objection to LOG. (Dan) LOG does conflict with the TOPS20 system convention which is that they’re the output of batch files. Do you care? (DEK) Oh I see. You mean if you gave a batch processing thing it would give you a LOG file for that too. Yeah, I see. So these three letter names have been taken—how about LN, for natural log? (Laughter) Okay, well, we’ll play around this again in discussion. Okay.

Start of talk

The topic of the hour is DVI files and actually I’ll spend a little bit of time talking about what TeX does as far as generating the DVI files is concerned, but I think I’ll spend more of the time just explaining exactly what the meaning of DVI files is. (The rest of this is not transcribed yet, just lightly cleaned up here and there.) The reason is most of your work is not is going to be doing something with DVI files and that’s outside the scope of TeX. TeX considers its job is done when it’s right written the DVI file but that’s when the hard work starts you have to you have to get it you know to make a really good system you should be able to handle many people wanting to print their DVI files in a big hurry and you might want to queue them up somehow send them to a printer you have to in order to print them you have to figure out how to set how to convert the DVI files to whatever the printer wants to see and combine it with pixel files or something for fonts and so on that’s where the work is and so you’re going to have that’s the unless you can find some system that already does the story they exist for things like versatech in the and a cannon and and you know the book them have to be done over and over for every device by every person but otherwise that’s that’s going to be a major part of your work is is something that isn’t really part of tech 82 at all it’s something that goes on after so you can be sitting there and have tech 82 and it’ll do all these great operations and give you a DVI file and there you’ll be sitting with the DVI file you probably want to know at least what that DVI file contains and that’s what I’m going to talk about this hour and we also have DVI types so you can you can list the DVI phone it would tell you what the page would look like if you if you had a printer to see it on that’s about the best we can do with the software that work okay okay DVI file stands for device independent and this is our goal is to best that text should be able to produce output that that can be used on many different devices and the director what drivers have in fact been written for lots of devices and we believe that any reasonable device can be driven by a DVI reading program that section it’s the device independent file four minutes part 40 of the right up and it starts now at module 4 98 which with the description of the octave of the DVI now this has gone through three generations DV the version 0 was the first duck was the first proposal for DVI then based on the experience the gain with that came out with version 1 one of the big differences was the way it the bites were packed in words mcarthur because most people needed them for example on a 36 bit machine that needed the leading bits to be Nina trailing bits to be 0 instead of the leading bits to be 0 when they tried file transfer protocols how many things and that was one of the major changes between version 0 and version 1 but now the present conventions here are version 2 which are similar to those in version one except that all that we’ve added more op codes and remembered all the out codes so you so you can’t print with you you have to change your DVI software slightly it has the same structure but different numbers to the to the codes and end up essentially the the revisions that were done at this stage were to clean things up by fill fill gaps in the in the previous thing and make it sort of a complete and more symmetrical and when an order that looked a little more reasonable now I guess I should go first into the discussion of what the DVI file looks like similar to what we say with the TFM file DVI file is is a again a packed file of 8 bits so it’s a sequence of codes 0 to 255 and whatever order you want to put those on your file doesn’t matter this line uh because we just put a week we just put it out as a sequence of 8 bits and I guess I could also present one on the screen like we did for the other case so you can see what they look like and on this machine so let’s see I probably have it I probably have a DVI file and my directory now nope okay let me see excuse me or like I think what I’ll do is this I i’ll use that as a last resort but I’m going to try to run tech and may can make a DVI now so let’s see I’ll run any tech which is the thing that has nothing at all pre-loaded what’s going on I’m swapped out this never happens I’d sale we’ve got four 4,000 we got four million words of memory requested by all the users at this point okay well I got in anyway okay now that’s the debugger that’s that’s talking to bed i’m talking to and I better make this a pretty short test program 00 tech cru who doesn’t match tangle me again so the fail the song check what’s going on here okay I’ll run the preloaded version instead of any tech sorry about this i have to anyway you might as well make up a DVI file and at this point I have to kill us some of the things that are pre-loaded because this is trip this is trip that’s pre-loaded and I really don’t want that so I’ve got to kill every Power which is set to sons ridiculous value that would happen at every paragraph and i’ll define a new font let’s say font 1 equals CMR 10 and then I’ll I think just say hello and get off so oh I got a select font 12 sakr and font and then I say hello and get out so let’s try end hmm ok an over full box that’s okay excuse me you sit up you see they where it says hello there has a vertical rule after it that’s because it had an over full box i made my age size zero so no wonder it is over full box okay i didn’t set age size to anything okay now well i could print it too we can go over and see if says hello on there but now anyway we have a DVI file and it’s called tech foot DVI that’s what happens if you don’t give a name if you got we said last time you know if you say in put to paper and your names are paper but it but i didn’t give any name and so see i got some mail here too ok so anyway uh the name the default name if not no no no that was specified by the first thing you did is t exp UT ok now over in jax hall we could read this message that says hello maybe and see it later on this afternoon but the DVI file itself is in there so we could we can first print it in octal format and then we can print it in more symbolic form tech put DVI bunch of zeros there at the beginning it’s not too long okay that that’s the file and now let’s let’s explain so anyway it looks like that will come back and and be able to understand what all those sevens are and stuff in a few minutes okay so that’s that’s a DVI file is supposed to be short it’s supposed to be reasonably compact way to describe printing and it’s also supposed to be easy for a machine to read efficiently these were designed by David Fuchs and I think those two goals are fairly well achieved of course my this isn’t all saying hello this is mostly overhead that’s involved with with all DVI files that saying what version number they are and things like that okay the the instructor the DVI file is best thought of I think as an interpretive routine we could have the lights on now and because I’ll be obviously going on its best thought of as an interpretive routine of like I are leased from the old days we call them interpretive routines these were programs that go through and and consider that they are of defining another another computer and we are we the interpretive routine are the central processing unit of this new computer and we and the interpretive routine is really a set a set of op codes and operands and so on something like machines actually execute in their hardware but we’re doing it in software and the opcode that comes along as the first thing so so it beginning of each bite and the DVI file starts out as an opcode and then depending on the opcode it has certain operands that that it expects to follow the opcode start on module five hundred page 174 of our listings and first op code is a very simple one set character 0 and it’s just a 0 so if our DVI file has a bite of 0 this is going to mean types that character 0 from the current font we wouldn’t give that first we better set up a current front because if current fun is undefined when we start the machine that we’re simulating here are defining in this DVI machine is has a few registers one of them is the font register f it’s an integer font numbers can be anything any 32-bit numbers so this will handle quite a few fonts in case you now tech will never generate however for a front number larger than the number of distinct fronts it handles which is something some quarter words so typically we would never get a very large front number of ourselves but DVI is is defined to allow large font numbers because tech isn’t the only assistant producing DVI files then we also have a current position on the page and that’s H and V horizontal and vertical coordinates on the page it’s just like Cartesian coordinates except upside-down that is if we gets bigger we move down instead of up but H gets bigger we move to the right so H and V are these things and the m0 position is the upper left corner of the page we start every page at zero and with font the current front undefined the then we have four other registers called w x y and z and these are used to keep track of spaces that we’re going to be using over again when we when we skip around in typically the amount of space that you move is is repeated and so we can save based on the DVI file by not repeating information over and over again W and X are two registers for horizontal units of spacing y and z are two registers for vertical units of spacing then we also have a stack built in our hypothetical machine and the stack contains values h v w x y and z these other registers get pushed on and popped up at various times so that we can in in one bite we can say push and one bites a pop and and thereby change a lot of these values go back to a previous state the current font is not pushed and popped and and this is really the because it saves it seems to be better not to now all of these things are 32-bit numbers including a sign so we go minus 2 to the 31 up to plus 2 to the 31 minus 1 this is a two’s complement type of a thing and and there’s a they’re given as when we say spacing H&V we we mean in terms of something some unit of measure of course now the unit of measure in version one DVI files was called the RSU for ridiculously small unit it’s intended to be such a small unit of measure that rounding errors don’t matter if they will accumulate the thousand of rounding errors and you’re off by a thousand RS use the ike still won’t see it or maybe a hundred anyway the impossible to notice well the the around the actual unit of measurement though is not defined particularly we don’t call them RS use anymore in this new report but there is a there’s a conversion factor at the end of the DVI file two numbers a numerator and denominator that we that that says if you multiply by the numerator and divided by the denominator then you get units of I think it’s ten to the minus seventh meters or 10-8 smita something like that so it’s so basically we do have a metric system involved here in tech always sets those numbers to the right to the right value so that that the units that tech outputs is scale points same as tech users everywhere else in its internal conversion which is pretty ridiculously small unit so scaled points is now to to the 16th of them make one printers point is rationally converted by a certain fraction into these into the metric system in case that it’s for other other programs writing DVI files would find other units to be appropriate ok now the DVI type program shows in great detail that’s one of these things in the tech where book shows in great detail how we recommend rounding positions I in the DVI file to lower rester devices I probably should meant to talk about that a little bit later but there’s but you see we have two kinds of units we have these ridiculously small units which we’re going to be giving our measurements in in a DVI file and then you have pixels of something on your actual device and you have to convert between the one and the other and proper way to do it is to keep most of your arithmetic in the in the DVI units and do rounding to pixels at key times like at the beginning of a word something like that okay now if you want to set types of character number zero from font from the current font f you just give byte 0 and what could be more compact in that I mean you okay similarly one up to 127 will Lil typeset characters one through 127 respectively now we couldn’t do this for all 256 characters in the front because we only have 256 opcodes and so if you have to set a character number 128 you do it in two bites and there’s a instruction set one this one’s called set one which is followed by the character that you’re supposed to set and so in the notation in the book it says C bracket one in the brackets is the number of bytes that we assume the upper end is 129 is set to which is c2 and 130 these are not generated by tech 82 this would be to set three bite and four byte characters there’s even a set for so all of these possibilities said for would say that that AC so if I gave 131 and would say reading the next four bytes and then whatever those four bytes are that’s the number of the character that you’re supposed to set next in the current file so we can handle France with 22 the 32 different characters in them of a DVI format is not tried to be restricted it’s supposed to be useful for I can smell even can even them things now are also people might use this somehow they might have some convention for these bits like this reflects the color or something like that who knows but right tackle only output see one for the characters 128 through 255 okay now this is typical of the commands and DVI that there will be versions one two three and four depending on how many bytes you need for the operand so that the command will tell you so if you if you are only if you only need a 2.2 byte number then you use the opcode that says that says so that only two bytes are needed afterwards so this is a 3 this is a 2-byte total command one for the opcode and one for the character this would be a 5 bike total command question no Dave what now all of these characters not only all these set instructions not only types at the character but they also move H to the right by the width of the character so this is this this is set character is 0 and H is set to h plus the width of that character so the DVI reading programs have to have access to the width information for each character just as the just as tech does and so V VI reading programs will use the same some check that tech had in order to make sure that it had the same in that it makes the same assumption because tech isn’t going to tell the DVI file how wide that character is DVI reader is supposed to get that out of some other thing we put this information also in the pixel file so that the pvi reading program doesn’t have to read both TFM file and pixel file so meta font will put this information out twice with the same sunk check so that you can make sure that your for your information is consistent but this is important for packing the packing the total length of keeping the totaling to DVI file down okay now there’s also a set rural character which is 132 and this one is followed by two operands a and B each 4 bytes lon all four byte long parameters are signed that means that if you have a 4-byte long parameter the first it could be between minus 2 231 and so I’m looking at the first bit of the sign however in these in these one and two and three bite characters it’s always plus so the character the the range here is for example in seat in set two is zero to sixty five 5 35 not you don’t have a negative character number for these but a 4-bike number is always considered to be signed so that we don’t overflow all the constraints of a 32-bit computer we supposed to be able to read this on a 32-bit computer which would want a form for byte number to be considered signed a signed integer I guess and the set rule instruction is like said care that it also will will advance h after the rules to another now eh eh is the height and B is the width of this rule and if if the height is zero or the width is 0 then we don’t do anything except move by B if any of these are negative so b is minus 5 for example we wouldn’t put any rule there because what’s the rule that’s minus five things wide it’s a it’s a kind of invisible or you could imagine tearing a hole in the paper or something I don’t know but all but it will move H and H will decrease by five in that in that case now there are rules specified in the tech 82 manual so that you should so that the rule rules there are things in the tech industry could get consistency between tech and meta fonts so that if somebody designs a character using meta font and has a certain conventions about how that he’s drawing a straight line in his character and then we have a DVI command that said sets a rule that we can guarantee that we’re going to line up the pixels perfectly so that the rule have the same number of pixels high as the other and those are spelled out in the in the book are precisely so it should be possible to to have consistency across across these things without no matter what the rounding conventions are so we designed the thing with with that uppermost in our mind that we should be able to to ensure perfect alignment this is important for example of embarrassing cases if you have up our large radical sign now actually has a little bit of a la atop to it because otherwise the on such a large case it would look bad if you if you variable was too close to it so we give this extra space in in the radical sign itself well then tech is going to put a rule next to that and the positioning is Bay it says that the the the rule the baseline of the square root sign is exactly the same as the baseline of the rule this means tech computes the same number for both of these and and they’re given and precisely the same DVI coordinates in terms of V here so there’ll be exactly the same height V about the line this rule will be set bias by exactly the height of this character and therefore we should get exactly the same output if if the DVI certain servers are implemented properly this should be exactly as thick in terms of number of pixels even if we move this up on the page one third of a pixel the rounding should have been exactly the same for both calculations for this one in this one wasn’t true in the present version attacked and but we get positive alignment in the other other version this by the way big square root would be an extensible character but the top part has this has this feature set rule i might mention goes up above that that the rule starts at the lower left corner the current position HP is the lower left corner of the of the rule and then so this is your reference point then you move h to the width of the rule afterwards now of corresponding to these set commands we also have put commands like 133 i believe is put one I won’t write them all out partly I don’t have have room for it put one followed by a 1 character code and the put commands are just like the set commands like this would put one month’s like set one you give a character code that you’re supposed two types it the only difference is that H doesn’t change this is when you’re setting characters above each other for example you would you might like to do that if you’re doing an extensible character like this and just put out the pieces of the replicating pieces however I don’t think tech deck tins 82 actually generates that command because we not we don’t have character nodes in vertical mode so there’s put commands and put rule and so on all right the operation 138 is a no op it does nothing and it just in case you have you for some reason you want to fill space or blank something out it’s something that tech doesn’t generate but you can have these between DVI commands if you want them for some some reason or other convenient to your software you can’t put a no op in in the middle of a program it has to be between between commands you couldn’t put a no op between a set one and it’s operandi was how would you know that that was you know that it wasn’t supposed to be character number hundred thirty-eight that you were doing there but you could what you can put it between commands all right okay well anyway there’s I don’t have to give these numbers anymore let me just give the mnemonics no op and then there’s not pop and yup and pop well push comes before pop but there’s a lot of these I’d seem to rhyme they bob is beginning of the page and this is the long one it’s followed by by 11 parameters each four bytes long we don’t expect this happens very often typically but it’s followed by C 0 4 bytes up to c 9 for bikes and then by another probe ID parameter of P which is a okay now p is a pointer to the previous Bob in the file and if it’s the very first pop in the file p is minus 1 so this allows you to go backwards through the file skipping back pages from the end of the file back to the front and we use this on some machines i think on the canon i use it for example because the the paper comes out and you would like it to be stained and it’s text so that it’s better to print the last page first otherwise after you get your output you have to you have to go like this to get them right so so they read the file backwards and bring it in that right yawn yes it takes so long to pick up the microphone man a few words okay we’ve got so so this allows you to go back through the file from P to the previous pop okay beginning beginning a page the c02 ce9 are the values of tech our cross reference values that a person can use in order to identify a page location in tech puts out the values of the first ten counters count 02 count nine so for this purpose so you can identify a page bye-bye it’s connor now what you usually get on your screen is just the value of count 0 but if you but sometimes people like to you know we’ll have have more sub structure to this and so David wanted to be generous so we put all you put 10 of them out I don’t know if anybody’s ever used more than three but our convention that we’ve been using with some success has been to print them out with dots for ample one dot-to-dot one would be a page where count 0 is 1 and count 1 is 2 and calm 3 is 1 and then when we give the starting page command on some say we’d like to start at a certain page if we said one dot star dot to this would mean find the first page that has the form count one is one count the count 0 is 1 count two is two and count one we don’t we don’t look at then it would print out it also depending on how many dots we got it would print out that Oh as its as its printing on on the on the console of the printer it would say I’m printing page something and it gives them we give the first three counts if I specified that if I specified in my starting if I said my starting page number was one star to star then it would give me four counts to show what page it’s at this convention seems to work out reasonably well for displaying page numbers as you’re doing if you have question one Bob for every ship out exactly a ship out set puts out a bob and in yup which is ender page right mm-hmm so now when you give a pop it starts out initializes all its registers 20 and the current font is undefined and the stack is empty you’re supposed to push and pops are supposed to be all contained before you get to the e op so the stack should be empty when you get to the end of page but the end of page is a time when you you print everything now when you in most cases when you’re when you’re implementing this you’ll be doing yup you’ll be doing a lot of computation at the time of EF that’s not reflected in my DVI type program because for most devices you have to sort the information into order by some coordinate or other either horizontal or vertical or something now the things that you get out of tech are not guaranteed to be in any particular order they tend to be in order but not always because subscripts and superscripts for example or people doing forefront of things with negative glue could certainly review the order the order that comes out in is somehow what we would call preorder in computer science as far as the list structure is concerned we just unwind the list recursively and take things as they as they come to us that tends to be in order and that tends to help sorting routines but tech doesn’t do the sorting itself that’s the responsibility of your DVI reading program if you if you need to sort some devices don’t need it some some devices too but what you typically do is you get to a Bach and then you start you start looking at the rest of the bytes and start and this gives you coordinate positions and characters and you start building a table and then when you get to the e op put that table we also build in a protection against overflowing the table so the table gets too full then we sort it now put that that part of it right there and then not continue on with the next partial part of the page to and sort sort each part we will break up this information if we have to on our alpha type serving things this turned out we didn’t need it until people started using our our programs for vlsi layout and so right now for example when you get a son workstation it was printed because of vvi files in tech and our software for driving the typesetter because we the masks that were made for for some of the boards will print work we’re done with software that had a huge number of commands between bop and yup okay oh now push says take your stack and your HB WXYZ registers go on to the stack and die and on top of whatever was there before do you don’t change any of their values and pop takes those takes low values from the stack and put some in to those registers for getting what the other registers were and typically why would you do that well it’s something it goes something like this but most pages might say consists of lines and so so the page is a vertical list and then when it then it comes to this point and it gets to the base line here and then it says push and now it goes into a horizontal list and starts moving across this way when it says pop later on we’re right back here then we can do a vertical motion gets us to here we push again and do this kind of computation at the end this vertical motion will be the same as that one so we’ve recaptured the same the previous value we don’t have to physically we don’t have to push is a pop is a fast way to back up to where you were before you see helps a lot with leaders and other things too that would tend to fill up these DVI files okay now the other the other commands are just 44 motion primarily and they there’s so many of them they fit into a simple pattern and this is right one right to write three right for I’ll just say right one as a representative of this class and it’s followed by an amount of vertical or horizontal motion be now in this case b is assigned quantity so this is between a minus 128 and less than a plus on or 28 is it needs in these commands where we’re talking about motion we use it so we use a sign number so right might actually send you to the left and the same with right to write three right four depending on how many right one is actually rather uncommon because these DVI units are so small that that we would have to move at least at least 200 or something in order to see it but it could happen the but usually right to is in may is in the ballpark of the motions that will actually be making and since we since the set character commands already do the right word motion most of the time this will be moving from word to word or just doing a little kerning between between letters of the word then there’s w0w 12 w 4 and interestingly this this the definition of the right command it does two things it says h 2 h plus B and it also sets w to be so the amount that you move by is saved in this register double wait a minute no no that’s not right no I’m sorry it doesn’t go any sorry w1w want is a command that sets h 2 h plus B there’s a beam be one associated with the sky h 2 h plus B and W to be and similarly w 4 is a followed by a 4-bike parameter and does the same thing now w0 just sets h 2 h plus W so that whenever we have the right amount of motion already in register w then we get by with a one-bite command and tech has a neat way of that seems amazingly effective and producing one byte commands on the examples I tried it learns the kind of spaces that you’re making and the type and it you know in normal text each line typically as one or two spaces that are there are 14 currents and 14 between letters between words math formulas have another kind of spacing that goes around the operators and things like that but this seems to learn them very quickly so that we can get by with one bite commands quite often there’s X 0 through X 4 same deal but using X instead of W we have these two registers each one can be used there’s no the present version of tech uses w only for space between words and x only for currents but tech 82 has an algorithm that tries to be to try to be clever in assigning these and so you can’t assume that it just because it’s an ex that it’s either occurring are something else that generated it now cook now similarly to the right than W and X we have bound y and z exactly the same except you replace horizontal by vertical motion in all the commands well that takes us up to operators e4 which is 107 170 we still got up to 2 to go up 255 possible opcodes well the next sixty four of them are all just to change current fine so 171 is set font 0 and your font num 0 excuse me so is the official name f NT and um and up to whatever 234 which is front number 63 this command sets f20 and up to 63 that’s all it does but we got to set the current front number and then we have front one two three and four 244 font numbers of one by two bytes three bytes four bytes so if we tech assigns its fonts internal codes and the first font that you named will get number 0 actually internally it’ll get number base plus 1 but this will convert to 0 in the DVI file and so only if you’ve given more than sixty four distinct France in your job will you ever need of this command 235 which is the fmt one instruction which is followed by one byte front specification and you could have any anything up to four bites one proviso is that that you’re not allowed to declare font number minus one phone number minus one is it is the only one you’re not allowed to have well there’s two more up codes and then its thinnest on front for is 238 so 239 is xxx this is what this is what comes out of the ex and instruction and so you people the interest in this for extensions to tech when somebody says X send in tech X end and then you give give something here this is expanded as if it was in the next step the any macros are expanded in this text and the resulting characters are placed after an ex ex ex command in the DVI file associated with the current H&V where you are where this X and appeared in the paragraph and it’s followed by one bite that tells how many bytes are following and then by the text in text in in text internal ascii code that’s invites lon now here if people feel strongly well okay somebody suggested the other day that he doesn’t want to restrict this m to 255 that he would like to be able to have x end of a huge long piece of text that coming out here right now we’re respecting it to 255 maximum through xn my inclination right now is that if you want to send a large amount of information your best bet is putting it in a file and naming that file here but if there’s a strong call that we need really an xxx to instruction that will take a to bite em and then we could go up to 65 k bytes I wouldn’t imagine wanting to six foot stick more than that into the middle of a DVI file for sure then what we would have to do is change the few programs that we already have reading this this version of DVI this if attack chain is ever to be made it should be made now because it could it could be done by a few people in a few minutes before this gets frozen but but next year be very difficult we have to say that’s DVI version free and so we still have a time to make such a change the only idea I’ve ever heard of that might might be useful for putting into present DVI file so you might think about that and give me some comments on it after there are right now we just have XXX limited to maximum 256 bytes in this in this xn the last op code is 240 which is the post amble and that’s the bestest range part of BPI files which I’ll be talking about soon I of course 241 to 255 aren’t defined and they’re there so it so it wouldn’t be that hard to switch in XXX 1xxx to there we still have a few left for for future use and no I know really great ideas as to what to do with them Roger oh yeah on the current TV I you have a trailer bite of some sort that comes after the post handle I don’t see that in this list that 0223 in the y’all talk about that that doesn’t it it it the only it only has meaning at the end of the post amble so it’s so so that’s a ok now the post amble is is so if we’re reading from the front of the from the front of the file we get to we get to 240 this should occur only right after a neo p after end of page we should never run into a bear post amble however techwood tech generated one the other day and i found out why i think it was in the middle of this can’t happen error so it didn’t get to the end of a pay this can’t happen error occurred in the middle of the DVI in middle of a ship out so you know it terminated right away but but in order to close out the DVI file that wrote a post amble so so it is possible you know to protect to generate this and the DVI reader would would reject click the file then when it got there and and and saw a post time were right in the middle of page now the post on bow is name is is one of the words that we had to make sure that we could hyphenate because it doesn’t appear in the English language dictionaries and in fact the present tech hyphenation Adam calls it opposed tambul so we had to put it in that list of words that you look like that was there yesterday to get it hyphenated properly it was it’s a client word but it means that we’re giving information that comes after instead of before but we really read it first we need the information first but tech doesn’t know it until the end so now it’s uh it would it the alternative of saving enough room at the beginning of a file for it was was was worse than what happened so David had this neat idea and it seems to be working fine to put the information at the end of the file and so at the very end of the file comes this this post hammer which is a huge long list of information it’s in module 5 03 of your book tells you what it is I’ll just read it to you first the first thing after the PST is four bytes that’s the pointer to the final blp in the file so this is the if there weren’t any Bo piece at all you get minus one there but this is the this is where you can start going backwards through the file then comes the numerator and denominator that i told you about telling you what your DVI units are defining those and then comes what is it m which is the magnification parameter so person in text said magnify two thousand there you’re going to get the number two thousand here this is something that is supposed to be applied globally throughout the entire file after everything else has been said and done also magnified by this mount so effectively it just it just goes in with the numerator and denominator and and the true calculation to convert DVI units to to these 10 to the 7th minus seventh meters is M times n divided by a thousand d that’s the that’s the factor that’s used when you generally compute that in floating point arithmetic now magnification passes through only in that way intec unless you say as for true dimensions you can you can ask for true inches true points or something in a dimension in tech and and if you ask for say 22 inches and your magnification was 2000 then tech would convert that to invention to one inch so that later on when you magnify it they are you get two inches but if you haven’t said true anywhere in your tech file then the only effect of the magnification parameter is to change this thing in the post amble that comes out here when you write DVI software it’s also a good idea to provide the user with a I mean in many cases it’s a good idea to provide the user with a chance to override the magnification option at the printing time and say just don’t you know just does pretend that the the tech job said to magnify a little bit more so of it so that you don’t have to rerun the tech job just can say okay spool is at fifty percent larger if you have the fonts at that size you can do it some people asked about about storing fronts at different magnifications we we since we can say CMR 10 add 15 points in cmr 10 at 20 points that means that we should have it in our in our front library these these options perhaps and how to name them well it depends on your on the system you’re using the the Dover software requires a certain naming convention that has quite a lot of structure but on other systems like when we use the Canon we we work with with just the ordinary file system in our computer and a file that’s been that’s been magnified to 44,000 for example gets a foot gets a suffix be called CMR 10 dot are 40 and at 10 point it would be called are 10 and so the server just looks for a font file or pixel file with us the suffix that matches the amount of magnification on our alpha type we use more digits than that but it’s something like that we say it’s an ant file for the Alpha type and we call it the suffix on it would be something like 1000 aunt fora for a normal font and twelve twelve hundred and four front that’s been magnified 12 on to something like that is we just put in the extension of the file name the indication as to these pixels were generated at a different at a different size from the from the other one what we do then in our software is we find the smallest size greater than or equal to the one that we’re supposed to print at and then we try to shrink it down if we can with with the printing hardware if you can’t do that and not we complain and say well we had a substitute of fun we try to substitute the closest we can that’s the kind of issue anyway magnification is this next thing in the post amble then there’s L and you Ellen you are the measurements of the tallest page the height plus depth of the tallest page and the width of the widest page so when we start typesetting a page we start at the upper left-hand corner l would represent the maximum height and depth of that page w you you is the I couldn’t call it W because W is one of the registers of the KPI machine so L is the maximum of all these numbers you is the maximum of all these sizes however this does not this does not tell you where the characters really are I mean somebody might’ve had an over full box that sticks out here or done backspacing or something on the margins and there might be characters outside these things this is just the box this the size of the box like it was a v-back was certain height and depth the maximum size of boxes that were shipped out but it’s not actually computed by the character the position of things in the box and these numbers the purpose of these numbers is so that you might want to put in your spooling software something that tries to lay things out on a piece of film and we wanted these things to like if you know if you can fit four on a four of these pages on one on one piece of your medium what that you’re printing on then you could you could save save the other tend to be expensive on some prototypes sou compact within yourself but we never really have implemented that yet we just put yelling you in for that purpose we’ve got other ways of specifying the user gives us a option file that tells where to put where to put the pages for a particular job each job has its own option for ireland’s that way now let’s see I covered Ellen you then comes T s and T s is the I think the greatest yeah the maximum stack depth if you it tells how big a stack you have to have in order to handle this this DVI file and T is the total number of pages in the file this in case you wondered to a number of Bob commands after that is the all-important font definitions and it and teck teck will only put out the font definitions that are actually used the if you if you’ve declared fonts but never set any characters from the funds it doesn’t come in the file and the front definition consists of the internal font number so that you can match it it’s like font number 0 through 63 typically then you got a checksum for the front so that you can so that you can do in checking make sure that this that you use the same information that their tech did when it generated this file you got an extra scale factor for the font this substitutes for the for the design size of the font and then you’ve got the area the font area and the font name that are just passed to you and as an ASCII string we do this for each font and then we have a minus 1 4 bytes representing minus one to tell you that you’re at the end of the fonts and that’s why font code minus one was not allowed because as soon as you get to a minus 1 yard then Venice then now after that phone number minus one we’re reading on module 504 then we got a pointer to the post ambika man so let’s see if I can make a little picture that my DVI file is going along and I’ve got a minus one sitting there and then I’ve got a pointer to the post amble command four bytes that give the address of the post animal command where Laura tiered where it appeared here after that comes the identification bite which is too so this is version two DVI file and then we’ve got out any number eight ER than or equal four bytes that are all equal to 2 23 now I gotta let you in on a secret 223 if you put it in hex is DF and David fuchs is the one who designed DVI files I believe it’s a little mutt too much of a coincidence so we call this the signature bytes of the DVI five and and we can put a least four of those in there and this is so this is to make it possible for if things are packed four bytes to a word to find the end of the file by means of routines that exist on most systems now Tanner Pascal doesn’t allow you to start reading a file at the end and do random positioning going back through the file but most systems do allow you to do this and if you if you don’t have such a system then you start at the beginning and zip up to the post down below and then start at the beginning again and cut and start your type setting but most systems you can get it from the back so you come back to the end of the file read back over the 220 freeze check that you got version 2 then this tells you where the post amble is the post amble tells you where they the previous Bop is if you want to go backwards or you can go back when anyway you can read all the fonts here and do the new the checking the DVI the DVI type program that we’ve distributed here includes both options and you can and you can see the code that would read the file in both directions yeah time is getting short but i would like to run DVI type on this file so you can see what it looks like on a reasonable file so let’s go back to the computer and see and I’m this was called tech foots evi and our output to tech foot that tight let’s say ok now it’s going to ask me for it’s going to ask me for several levels for several things and it also says I can type ? for help and two for a complete listing 0 for errors only one for something in between I’m going to get a 2 for a complete listing the starting page I can I can use the default if I said star dot star however i’ll show you that just will print out but both count numbers count 0 and count 1 both of which happen to be 0 i guess maximum number of pages is you know i’ll just type just a lot to do a million pages if they’re either many then it will convert things to pixels per inch and if I want to if I want points instead of if I want points those seven be 227 points in 100 inches so i’ll type 72 27 / 100 the magnification i can i can just say return to keep the old magnification on any of those i could have typed help and I was in now it’s done it so I can look at the file texsport type and this should be the DVI file that we created got to move it over to the right again okay so i told me the options that i selected and post animal starts at byte number 68 the bites are numbered starting at 0 gives me the numerator denominator magnification was set at 2000 because of the the trip file actually set magnification 2000 so things are getting magnified twice and we loaded font 3cm are 10 at size 10 DVI units but that actually will be magnified ok now the because the DVI units are are magnified ok so beginning so byte number 0 was the beginning of page 0 point 0 and if I had said starve dot star that startup star than I would have seen all the counters of that page then it says down three four or five 5 1 11 so so the vertical the register V is moving down the page by four and 55,000 DVI units has a warning here says the absolute value of v is greater than zero well I don’t understand that at all I have to think about that what’s so bad about that what no all right do you think so that’s don’t let that line is is complete okay well that doesn’t seem oh oh I see yeah yeah if you look up here it says max v equals zero you see that was the the max V is the largest supposedly largest v that’s that you’ve got and this is warning me that I’ve exceeded that with some characters outside of there okay well thank you so then I push and then get my first but a box and I’m end this comment here that I’m at level 0 of the stack has the following values of h VW x y&z the eighth double h and double V are the are rounded two pixels which in this case is rounded two points so I’m 14 points below the upper corner of this thing because of probably the baseline skip which i’m not sure what it was must have been seven points or something like that for the top baseline oh now then at bite 50 of the DVI file i selected an instruction font number three so the so i picked up font number three font number zero one and two were preloaded to be those trip fonts that i didn’t actually use the so the current front now is see mr 10 in invite 51 of the DVI file i’m setting character 72 which is ABC which should be a capital H for hello and you see down there in brackets there’s a comment if I hadn’t asked for for level two which gives me everything I would have just seen hello would have gotten a much more terse description from DVI type I’ve asked for everything when i said the output level is to here so that transcribes all of these characters into hello and then it set a rule this was a rule put out for an overflow box because when one thing that I had set in that you know pre-loaded option was that that every over full box should get a rule that’s 55 points wide now I look at this rule it’s 14 x x 10 wide that’s because it’s been magnified twice so I’m actually getting one 10-point a rule at ten points wide so if we went over and look at the hard copy that came off the Dover we would have seen a rule at the end of the word hello that was 14 points of high and 10 wide and the Hello would have been set at 20 points instead of at 10 points then it pops and we go back to the previous level of the stack and the page and that was it so that’s the deep that’s the idea of how the DVI file for a short program time is running out now so we’ll have to break and meet again at three thirty for our final session