1 09/27/77  shrink_seg
 2 
 3 Syntax: shrink_seg path {-control arg}
 4 
 5 
 6 Function: replaces vertical and horizontal white space in a
 7 segment with appropriate horizontal tab, vertical tab, and newpage
 8 characters.  Trailing white space in each line and at the end of
 9 the segment is deleted.
10 
11 
12 Arguments:
13 path
14   is the pathname of an ASCII segment.  It may contain any of
15   the printing ASCII graphics and the control characters: space,
16   backspace, newline, horizontal tab, vertical tab, newpage.
17   Other control characters, if they appear, will be assumed to
18   occupy one printing position for the purposes of calculating tab
19   stops.
20 
21 
22 Control Arguments:
23 -brief, -bf
24    suppress a message indicating the old and new lengths of the
25    segment.
26 
27 
28 Notes:
29 [updated 01/03/84]
30 The primary purpose of this command is to reduce the size of a
31 segment that may contain many consecutive spaces or newlines, thus
32 potentially reducing storage charges for it.  If the segment is to
33 be printed on the Multics line printer (-rqt line_prt), where
34 printing costs are based on the number of lines printed,
35 replacement of consecutive newlines with newpage or vertical tab
36 characters can considerably decrease printing costs (printing on
37 the Xerox page printers, which is now the default mode for
38 printing, is based on per-page charges and so is not affected by
39 shrinking).  The appearance of a line printer "shrunken" segment
40 will be nearly the same as if the original segment had been
41 printed with the -no_endpage option.  The no_endpage option is not
42 required when printing the shrunken segment unless the original
43 segment would have required the no_endpage option to print
44 properly (i.e., if the original segment has more than 60 lines
45 between newpage characters and no auto- matic page skipping is to
46 be performed, then the no_endpage option should be used to print
47 the shrunken segment).