DITROFF/FFORTID, an adaptation of the UNIX/DITROFF for formatting bidirectional text

  • Authors:

  • Cary Buchman;Daniel M. Berry;Jakob Gonczarowski

  • Affiliations:

  • Univ. of California, Los Angeles;Univ. of California, Los Angeles;Hebrew Univ., Jerusalem, Israel

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS)
  • Year:
  • 1985

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Abstract

DITROFF/FFORTID, a collection of pre- and postprocessors for the UNIX DITROFF (Device Independent Typesetter RunOFF) is described. DITROFF/FFORTID permits formatting of text involving a mixture of languages written from left to right and from right to left, such as English and Hebrew. The programs are table driven or macro-generated to permit them to be used for any languages written from left to right and from right to left so long as fonts with the proper character sets can be mounted on a typesetting device supported by DITROFF. The preprocessors are set up to permit phonetic, unidirectional input of all of the alphabets needed using only the two alphabets (each case counts as an alphabet) available on the input device. These macro-generated preprocessors can be adjusted to the user's pronunciation, the language's rules about a letter's form, depending on its position in the word, and the language of the user's input keyboard. The postprocessor is set up to properly change direction of formatting when the text switches to a language written in a different direction. The collection of programs is also designed to allow use of any of DITROFF's preprocessors, such as PIC, EQN, TBL, and the various device drivers.