LPTOPS 1L "07 May 1996" "Version 3.1.3" [section 5 of 12]



On all operating systems, lptops option names are distinguished from file names by the presence of an initial hyphen (dash, minus sign). On TOPS-20 and VAX VMS, following the conventions of those systems, an initial slash also indicates an option. In this documentation, we will use only the hyphen form.

Options can be supplied in an initialization file, and on the command line; command-line settings override initialization file settings. See the INITIALIZATION FILE section below.

To process a file whose name begins with a hyphen, hide the hyphen behind a directory path. For example, on UNIX, the file name -foo.bar could be written as ./-foo.bar.

A command-line argument consisting of a single hyphen is taken as a reference to the standard input file, rather than as an illegal option. UNIX and MS DOS, at least, lack a way of referring to the standard I/O units by a file name, so the hyphen convention is commonly used in UNIX software. A hyphen can be used anywhere a file name can be used, but only the first instance can usefully supply data to lptops.

Letter case in option names is ignored, but is significant in option values. Long option names may be abbreviated to the minimum unique prefix.

Option descriptions with [=num] following the option name can have an optional integer value. If the value is omitted, then the option if set if it was previously unset, and unset if it was previously set. If an integer value is provided, then a zero value unsets the option, and a non-zero value sets it, independent of any prior setting of the option. Instead of an integer value, you may specify a string value of yes or true to set the option, or no or false to unset it. The string values may be abbreviated, and letter case is not significant.

For options that take a value, that value must be supplied in the same argument, separated from the option name by a colon or equals sign. The separator character may be preceded and followed by an arbitrary number of spaces and tabs, provided suitable shell quoting is supplied to protect the spaces from being interpreted as argument separators. If the value begins with a non-letter, the separator can be omitted. For example, -p:10bp, -p=10bp, '-p 10bp"' and -p10bp are equivalent. However -fHelvetica is illegal because the value starts with a letter; it must be written as -f:Helvetica, -f=Helvetica, or '-f Helvetica'.

Display an author credit on stderr.
Set the bottom margin to # (default: 1.0in).
Print num copies of each page (default: 1).
Clip long lines at column boundaries and page margins. Normally, such lines are permitted to extended into the next column, or into the right margin. See the -wrap option for an alternative.
Display the program copyright on stderr.
Use Adobe PostScript standard character set encoding instead of the default ISO8859 Latin-1 encoding. The two encodings are equivalent in the lower 128 characters of the 256-character set, and the output is somewhat smaller if the default ISO8859-1 encoding is suppressed by this option, so pure-ASCII sites may wish to make this the default (see the INITIALIZATION FILE section below).
(short form) Set the output PostScript font name. The option value is the full PostScript name, or an abbreviation for the full name from the tables below. The default is Courier, a fixed-width typewriter font. Computer program listings and output are usually best displayed in such a font, so that the output resembles the screen images.

The following 13 fonts are available on most PostScript printers. The second column provides font abbreviations used by this and earlier versions of lptops; the third column contains ditroff(1L) font abbreviations, and the fourth column, Adobe TranScript font abbreviations. Any of these abbreviations may be used to specify a font name.

	     Font		     Alternate Names

	     Courier		     C	    C	  C
	     Courier-Bold	     CB	    CB	  CB
	     Courier-BoldOblique     CBO    CD	  CD
	     Courier-Oblique	     CO	    CO	  CO
	     Helvetica		     H	    he	  he
	     Helvetica-Bold	     HB	    He	  He
	     Helvetica-BoldOblique   HBO    HE	  HE
	     Helvetica-Oblique	     HO	    hE	  hE
	     Symbol		     S	    S	  S
	     Times-Bold		     TB	    R	  ti
	     Times-BoldItalic	     TBI    BI	  TI
	     Times-Italic	     TI	    I	  tI
	 Font				Alternate Names

	 AvantGarde-Book		AGB	ag   ag
	 AvantGarde-BookOblique		AGBO	aG   aG
	 AvantGarde-Demi		AGD	Ag   Ag
	 AvantGarde-DemiOblique		AGDO	AG   AG
	 Bookman-Demi			BD	Bo   Bo
	 Bookman-DemiItalic		BDI	BO   BO
	 Bookman-Light			BL	bo   bo
	 Bookman-LightItalic		BLI	bO   bO
	 Helvetica-Narrow		HN	hn   hn
	 Helvetica-Narrow-Bold		HNB	Hn   Hn
	 Helvetica-Narrow-BoldOblique	HNBO	HN   HN
	 Helvetica-Narrow-Oblique	HNO	hN   hN
	 NewCenturySchlbk-Bold		NCSB	Nc   Nc
	 NewCenturySchlbk-BoldItalic	NCSBI	NC   NC
	 NewCenturySchlbk-Italic	NCSI	nC   nC
	 NewCenturySchlbk-Roman		NCSR	nc   nc
	 Palatino-Bold			PB	Pa   Pa
	 Palatino-BoldItalic		PBI	PA   PA
	 Palatino-Italic		PI	pA   pA
	 Palatino-Roman			PR	pa   pa
	 ZapfChancery-MediumItalic	ZCMI	ZC   ZC

The ditroff(1L) and TranScript abbreviations are identical, except for the Courier and Times fonts. For convenience, matches of option values with the full font name, and the first abbreviation, ignore letter case. The second and third abbreviations are based on two-letter mnemonics, where upper-case in the first letter indicates bold, and upper-case in the second letter indicates italic, so letter case is significant for them.

Only the Courier fonts are fixed-width fonts. The others are proportionally spaced and tabular material will not line up properly. The Courier fonts have a width equal to 0.6 of their point size, so to fill a line W inches wide with up to N characters, one must have point size <= (W/(0.6 * N * 72)) = (W*120)/N bp. Equivalently, with a point size P bp, the output spacing is 120/P char/inch.

If you specify a bold, italic, or bold-italic font name for the normal font in the -font option, lptops will use different styles for the remaining fonts. For example, -font=Palatino-Bold would use Palatino-Bold for normal text, and Palatino-Roman for bold text.

(long form) Define a new font family. Because of its length, this option would normally not be specified on the command line; see the INITIALIZATION FILE section below.

The option value consists of 5n font names, separated by space, tab, or comma. If white space is present in a command-line argument, it may be necessary to supply suitable shell quoting to prevent interpretation of the spaces as argument separators.

The five typeface styles must be complete case-sensitive PostScript font names. Up to three additional aliases can be provided immediately following each font name, and the same number of aliases must be provided for each style. Aliases make it convenient to have shorter names for popular fonts.

Up to 100 additional families can be defined; if necessary, that limit can be increased at compile time when lptops is built.

The five typeface styles should come from the same font family, since it is usually considered bad typographic practice to mix font families in running text. However, lptops does not prevent such mixing.

Here are some examples. The backslash-newline is provided here to indicate a line break for readability; it is not present in the actual option. Spaces in the option values are for readability; quoting of the complete value is not necessary (or even possible) for options in an initialization file, but would be required in command-line use.

-font=Courier,C,C,C, \
      Courier-Bold,CB,CB,CB, \
      Courier-Oblique,CO,CO,CO, \
      Courier-BoldOblique,CBO,CD,CD, \

This is equivalent to the default Courier font family, with a short name, a ditroff(1) name, and a TranScript name for each style.

-font=Utopia-Regular,  Utopia-Bold,  Utopia-Italic, \
      Utopia-BoldItalic, Courier

This defines the Utopia family, with no aliases for the long font names; a subsequent -font=Utopia-Regular option would be needed to select the font.

-font=CharterBT-Regular,BCH,  CharterBT-Bold,BCHB,  \
      CharterBT-Italic,BCHI, \
      CharterBT-BoldItalic,BCHBI,  \

This defines the Bitstream Charter family, with a single alias for each long font name.

Set the top margin to # for the initial page (e.g. for use with letterhead paper). If not specified, the value given for the top margin will be used; see the -t option below.
Use landscape mode (horizontal page orientation, with printing parallel to the longest page edge). The default is portrait mode (vertical page orientation, with printing parallel to the shortest page edge).

The same result can be obtained by choosing a landscape paper type; see the description of the -paper option.

Set the left margin to # (default: 1.0in).
Produce multiple column output (num columns) (default: 1). In multiple column mode, formfeeds cause column breaks instead of page breaks.
Input is from nroff(1). Overstruck text will be displayed in a bold font, and underlined text in a normal font with underlining. The underlining works correctly with proportionally-spaced fonts as well as fixed-width ones. The nroff sequences <+><backspace><o> and <o><backspace><+> will be displayed as a bullet character from the PostScript Symbol font. <ESCape><7> and <vertical tab> (reverse line feed), <ESCape><8> (reverse half line feed), and <ESCape><9> (half line feed) sequences are recognized and handled.

Since UNIX manual pages formatted by nroff(1) are intended for screen display, best results will be obtained if a fixed-width font, such as the default Courier, is chosen. If you want to typeset manual pages, you should use ditroff(1L) or groff(1L) instead, since those programs can produce PostScript directly, and will use proportional fonts for the -man format.

Number the output pages. The margin in which the number is placed can be selected by the letters t (top) or b (bottom), and the position of the number can be further specified by l (left), c (center), or r (right). The number is placed by default in the center of the top margin. If num is given, start numbering with that value, and otherwise with 1. If an initial top margin value is given with the -i option, numbering will be omitted on the first page if it is at the top, on the assumption that the top margin modification accounts for a letter head.

Pages are unnumbered if this option is not specified.

Outline pages (and columns) with a line that is # units wide. A narrow line of 0.4pt width is assumed if # is omitted; this particular width is what TeX uses in typesetting.
Set the font point size (default: 10bp). The baseline skip (the spacing between successive character baselines) is conventionally chosen to be 6/5 of this value, so that with 10bp type, we have 12bp between lines, or 6 lines/inch, the same as standard printer output.
Select pages to be output. Each entry in the comma-separated list is a page number, or a page range, or a page range and page step. Numbers within an entry can be separated by any character other than a digit or comma. For example, -pages=1,7,10-12,20:30:2 would select pages 1, 7, 10, 11, 12, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28, and 30. If multiple -pages options are specified, their effect is cumulative. The previous example could be written equivalently as -pages=1 -pages=7 -pages='10 up to 12' -pages='20 to 30 by 2'. The order of multiple -pages options, and page ranges, is not significant; thus -pages=1:20:2 -pages=2:20:2 would print all pages from 1 to 20 consecutively, not odd-numbered pages followed by even-numbered pages. To accomplish the latter, you must run lptops twice.
(short form) Select a paper size by name. The standard sizes available are:
A			  8.5in	    11in   Index:23x35		23in	 35in
B			   11in	    17in   Index:24x36		24in	 36in
C			   17in	    22in   Index:25.5x30.5    25.5in   30.5in
D			   22in	    34in   Index:28x44		28in	 44in
E			   34in	    44in   A0		       841mm   1189mm
Computer-1411		   14in	    11in   A1		       594mm	841mm
Legal			  8.5in	    13in   A2		       420mm	594mm
Letter			  8.5in	    11in   A3		       297mm	420mm
US-Legal		  8.5in	    14in   A4		       210mm	297mm
A-L			   11in	   8.5in   A5		       148mm	210mm
Computer-1411-L		   11in	    14in   A6		       105mm	148mm
Legal-L			   13in	   8.5in   A7			74mm	105mm
Letter-L		   11in	   8.5in   A8			52mm	 74mm
US-Legal-L		   14in	   8.5in   A9			37mm	 52mm
COM10			  4.1in	   9.5in   A10			26mm	 37mm
DL			  110mm	   220mm   A0L		      1189mm	841mm
Executive		 7.25in	  10.5in   A1L		       841mm	594mm
Monarch			  3.9in	   7.5in   A2L		       594mm	420mm
A4Small			  210mm	   297mm   A3L		       420mm	297mm
Ledger			   11in	    17in   A4L		       297mm	210mm
LetterSmall		  8.5in	    11in   A5L		       210mm	148mm
Note			  8.5in	    11in   A6L		       148mm	105mm
Bond:8.5x11		  8.5in	    11in   A7L		       105mm	 74mm
Bond:8.5x14		  8.5in	    14in   A8L			74mm	 52mm
Bond:11x17		   11in	    17in   A9L			52mm	 37mm
Bond:17x22		   17in	    22in   A10L			37mm	 26mm
Bond:17x28		   17in	    28in   B0		      1000mm   1414mm
Bond:19x24		   19in	    24in   B1		       707mm   1000mm
Bond:19x28		   19in	    28in   B2		       500mm	707mm
Bond:22x34		   22in	    34in   B3		       353mm	500mm
UncoatedBook:17.5x22.5	 17.5in	  22.5in   B4		       250mm	353mm
UncoatedBook:19x25	   19in	    25in   B5		       176mm	250mm
UncoatedBook:23x29	   23in	    29in   B6		       125mm	176mm
UncoatedBook:23x35	   23in	    35in   B0L		      1414mm   1000mm
UncoatedBook:25x38	   25in	    38in   B1L		      1000mm	707mm
UncoatedBook:35x45	   35in	    45in   B2L		       707mm	500mm
UncoatedBook:38x50	   38in	    50in   B3L		       500mm	353mm
Text:17.5x22.5		 17.5in	  22.5in   B4L		       353mm	250mm
Text:23x35		   23in	    35in   B5L		       250mm	176mm
Text:25x38		   25in	    38in   B6L		       176mm	125mm
Text:26x40		   26in	    40in   C0		      1294mm	916mm
CoatedBook:19x25	   19in	    25in   C1		       916mm	647mm
CoatedBook:23x29	   23in	    29in   C2		       647mm	458mm
CoatedBook:23x35	   23in	    35in   C3		       458mm	323mm
CoatedBook:25x38	   25in	    38in   C4		       323mm	229mm
CoatedBook:35x45	   35in	    45in   C5		       229mm	161mm
CoatedBook:38x50	   38in	    50in   C6		       161mm	114mm
Cover:20x26		   20in	    26in   Octavo		 5in	  8in
Cover:23x35		   23in	    35in   Sixmo	       6.5in	  8in
Cover:25x38		   25in	    38in   Quarto		 8in	 10in
Cover:26x40		   26in	    40in   Foolscap	       8.5in	 13in
Index:22x28		   22in	    28in   Government-legal    8.5in	 13in
Index:22.5x28.5		 22.5in	  28.5in   Folio	       8.3in	 13in
Index:23x29		   23in	    29in

Letter case is not significant in matching paper names. Default left, right, top, and bottom margins are 25mm for paper sizes given in millimeters, and 1in for sizes in inches.

(long form) Define a paper name, and its width, height, left margin, right margin, bottom margin, and top margin. If the margin values are omitted, then 1in values are assumed. Up to 25 extra paper sizes can be specified to supplement the built-in ones.
Set quiet mode. Suppress display of status and warning messages on stderr. Error messages are never suppressed.
Produce pages in reverse order, from last to first. This order is appropriate for printers that stack output face up, such as the original Apple LaserWriter. Most newer printers stack face down, and some can do it either way, so this option is a good candidate for local customization; see the INITIALIZATION FILE section below.
Set right margin to # (default: 1.0in).
Set special handling. Use the manual feed tray for the first num pages of the output. If N multiple copies are in effect (see option -c), then N*num sheets must be fed manually. If num is omitted, then all pages are to be fed manually.
Turn Scribe-like bold and italic requests (@b[...] and @i[...]) into bold or italic text. As a convenient extension to Scribe's facilities, underline requests of the form @u[...] are also recognized, as well as @h[...] for bold-italic, and @t[...] for typewriter text. The letter following the @ may be in either case, and string delimiters may be matching braces, square brackets, parentheses, angle brackets, apostrophes, quotation marks, or back accents. The delimiting characters may not occur in the string.

To get a single @ in the output, use @@ in the input. If this option is not specified, then @ characters have no special significance, and need not be doubled.

Control characters other than tab are forbidden between the string delimiters; thus, a single @b[...] cannot be used to print an entire paragraph in bold text.

Set the top margin to # (default: 1.0in).
Display the program version string on stderr.
Wrap long lines at column boundaries and page margins. Normally, such lines are permitted to extend into the next column, or into the right margin. When this option is selected, line wraps will cause generation of additional lines, which may introduce additional page breaks; this can interfere with the appearance of a document that has already been paginated. See the -clip option for an alternative. Effective use of this option requires access to Adobe font metric files; see the FONTS section for details.
Set the interline spacing (baseline skip, or leading) to #. The default value is 1.2 times the point size.