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* Re: [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix
  2022-01-13  2:04 [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix josh
@ 2022-01-13  2:03 ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
  2022-01-13  3:24 ` Win Treese
                   ` (2 subsequent siblings)
  3 siblings, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread
From: Greg 'groggy' Lehey @ 2022-01-13  2:03 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: josh; +Cc: coff


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On Wednesday, 12 January 2022 at 21:04:32 -0500, josh wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Given the recent (awesome) discussions about the history of *roff and TeX, I
> thought I'd ask about where Brian Reid's Scribe system fits in with all this.
> His thesis is available online here:
> http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/scan/CMU-CS-81-100.pdf, and in my
> opinion is very interesting (also cites papers on roff and TeX). Does anybody
> know if Scribe was ever used on Unix systems? Does it exist at all
> today?

That brings back memories, not of Scribe, but of Scribble by (I think)
Craig Finseth of Mark of the Unicorn, who also wrote the MINCE (MINCE
Is Not Complete Emacs) editor.  This would have been round 1980.

Scribble was the first serious text formatting program that I used,
and I quite liked it.  I can't recall how it compares to more
mainstream systems.

Greg
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* [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix
@ 2022-01-13  2:04 josh
  2022-01-13  2:03 ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
                   ` (3 more replies)
  0 siblings, 4 replies; 29+ messages in thread
From: josh @ 2022-01-13  2:04 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: coff

Hi all,

Given the recent (awesome) discussions about the history of *roff and TeX, I
thought I'd ask about where Brian Reid's Scribe system fits in with all this.
His thesis is available online here:
http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/scan/CMU-CS-81-100.pdf, and in my
opinion is very interesting (also cites papers on roff and TeX). Does anybody
know if Scribe was ever used on Unix systems? Does it exist at all today?

Thanks :)
Josh
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* Re: [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix
  2022-01-13  2:04 [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix josh
  2022-01-13  2:03 ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
@ 2022-01-13  3:24 ` Win Treese
  2022-01-13 14:56   ` Clem Cole
  2022-01-13  3:26 ` Theodore Ts'o
  2022-01-13 13:54 ` Adam Sampson
  3 siblings, 1 reply; 29+ messages in thread
From: Win Treese @ 2022-01-13  3:24 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: josh; +Cc: coff



> On Jan 12, 2022, at 9:04 PM, josh <joshnatis0@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> Given the recent (awesome) discussions about the history of *roff and TeX, I
> thought I'd ask about where Brian Reid's Scribe system fits in with all this.
> His thesis is available online here:
> http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/scan/CMU-CS-81-100.pdf, and in my
> opinion is very interesting (also cites papers on roff and TeX). Does anybody
> know if Scribe was ever used on Unix systems? Does it exist at all today?

Scribe was in the mix after troff and TeX. Brian Reid’s observation was that
writers should be writing, and publishing professionals should design how
documents look. Writers can describe that they want emphasized words,
chapters, sections, quotations, and the appearance of those is designed by
people who know about how to do that.

The software was commercially available on UNIX and other systems for
some time from a company called Unilogic, later Scribe Systems, but it
didn’t survive in the marketplace. Wordstar and Microsoft Word came
along on the desktop, and academics didn’t like paying for it.

Reid’s idea of how the work should be distributed was swept aside by
publishing tools that writers could use to do passable documents but
not beautiful ones. In real publishing, the division still exists: lots of
writing in, say, Microsoft Word that is reworked in publishing software
like Quark or InDesign for actual printing.

But one could argue that Scribe sort of exists in a way, in LaTeX. My
understanding is that Leslie Lamport started LaTex as exactly a way
to bring Scribe’s ideas to producing TeX documents, and the basic
LaTeX structure looks a lot like Scribe. 

Because you can dive into TeX to tweak all the tiny details, and
because LaTeX packages work at all different levels of abstraction,
it’s sometimes hard to see the separation there, especially when
you’re fighting with LaTeX to submit a paper. But it’s the Scribe
idea at the core.

 - Win



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* Re: [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix
  2022-01-13  2:04 [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix josh
  2022-01-13  2:03 ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
  2022-01-13  3:24 ` Win Treese
@ 2022-01-13  3:26 ` Theodore Ts'o
  2022-01-13 16:25   ` Larry McVoy
  2022-01-13 16:33   ` Dan Cross
  2022-01-13 13:54 ` Adam Sampson
  3 siblings, 2 replies; 29+ messages in thread
From: Theodore Ts'o @ 2022-01-13  3:26 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: josh; +Cc: coff

On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 09:04:32PM -0500, josh wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Given the recent (awesome) discussions about the history of *roff and TeX, I
> thought I'd ask about where Brian Reid's Scribe system fits in with all this.
> His thesis is available online here:
> http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/scan/CMU-CS-81-100.pdf, and in my
> opinion is very interesting (also cites papers on roff and TeX). Does anybody
> know if Scribe was ever used on Unix systems? Does it exist at all today?

Scribe was used at Project Athena at MIT, where it was running on BSD
4.3+ on Vax/750's.  So it was definitely used on Unix systems.  There
were thesis templates for Undergraduates using both Scribe and LaTeX.
LaTeX was pretty painfully slow on 1 MIPS machines, but it was better
at typesetting complex math equations, which gave it the edge for
people majoring in Math, Compter Science, and Engineering degrees.

My impression was that Scribe was a bit more popular for people
majoring in Humanities (at MIT, Theater, Music, Social Studies,
Foreign Languages, etc., were all collapsed into a single department,
aka Course 21 --- and there *were* some people who ended up graduating
with an undergraduate degree in Course 21, with a concentration in,
say, Theater or Music).

Speaking of typesetting equations, how would people compare eqn versus
LaTeX?  I used nroff for man pages, but I never did learn how to use
eqn for nroff.

						- Ted
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* Re: [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix
  2022-01-13  2:04 [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix josh
                   ` (2 preceding siblings ...)
  2022-01-13  3:26 ` Theodore Ts'o
@ 2022-01-13 13:54 ` Adam Sampson
  2022-01-13 16:37   ` Lars Brinkhoff
  3 siblings, 1 reply; 29+ messages in thread
From: Adam Sampson @ 2022-01-13 13:54 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: josh; +Cc: coff

josh <joshnatis0@gmail.com> writes:

> [...] Brian Reid's Scribe system [...] Does it exist at all today?

SAIL's copy of the Scribe source code is in the SAILDART archive:
  https://saildart.org/[SCR,SYS]/

It's written in BLISS, and appears to have support for both BLISS-10 and
BLISS-11.

-- 
Adam Sampson <ats@offog.org>                         <http://offog.org/>
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* Re: [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix
  2022-01-13  3:24 ` Win Treese
@ 2022-01-13 14:56   ` Clem Cole
  2022-01-13 15:08     ` John P. Linderman
                       ` (2 more replies)
  0 siblings, 3 replies; 29+ messages in thread
From: Clem Cole @ 2022-01-13 14:56 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Win Treese; +Cc: coff


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below.... [excellent job -- you wrote what I had planned -- few
tweeks/color added below].

On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 10:31 PM Win Treese <treese@acm.org> wrote:

> Scribe was in the mix after troff and TeX.

Fun fact, I believe that bwk was Brian's thesis committee


> Brian Reid’s observation was that writers should be writing, and
> publishing professionals should design how documents look.

It was even more important than that.  Brian Reid observed that *most
documents* looked like their brethren.   For instance, the Unix doc looks
like BTL TM format.  Each university tends to have a 'style' for their
thesis [-me 'knows' how to generate UCB thesis format].  Office
correspondence (letters, memo for file) have a certain look.    So he wants
to separate the description of the output (*i.e.* a template) for a
document and not make the person that did want (need too) think about the
output, just do their thing (as you said -- let writer's write).




> Writers can describe that they want emphasized words,
> chapters, sections, quotations, and the appearance of those is designed by
> people who know about how to do that.
>
> The software was commercially available on UNIX and other systems for
> some time from a company called Unilogic, later Scribe Systems,

There is a long (and somewhat nasty history history here).  Mike Shamus was
a one-time CMU CS prof.   He created Unilogic and arranged for the IP to be
transferred to him.   They had a transpiler that converted 'compatible
BLISS' (*a.k.a*. Vax Bliss) to other languages.  I believe that a flavor of
Pascal, Ada and C were possible outputs.   I'm not sure of the provenance
of the transpiler.   Contemporary with Scribe was the PQCC project -
Product Quality Compiler Compiler, that Wulf and his students were
working.  That work forked Tartan labs around the same time as Unilogic and
I know transpilers had been part of the original work, but I never closed
the loop.  To be honest they had to have been related in some manner, but
that all happened after I had left.

At that point, Scribe had been converted from the original PDP-10 version
to compatible BLISS on VAX/VMS.   Unilogic sold versions of Scribe for
TOPS, Vax both VMS and Unix, Sun, Apollo and I believe a number of other
systems (maybe HP and AIX).  The sad part is that history seems to have
lost both Scribe and the associated transpiler (if anyone knows otherwise,
I'd love to hear something).


> but it didn’t survive in the marketplace. Wordstar and Microsoft Word came
> along on the desktop, and academics didn’t like paying for it.
>
+1  and for many documents (like business letters), I always found Scribe
easier - but maybe that's because I grew up the idea of an editor and *document
compiler* (roff and friends)..

>
> Reid’s idea of how the work should be distributed was swept aside by
> publishing tools that writers could use to do passable documents but
> not beautiful ones.

Amen

In real publishing, the division still exists: lots of
> writing in, say, Microsoft Word that is reworked in publishing software
> like Quark or InDesign for actual printing.
>
To give ex-CMU and UCB grad, Ken Keller credit. He tried to bridge that
with his FrameMaker program (which I think Adobe still owns - I have not
seen much about it in few years and have lost track of Keller).  IIRC Ken's
program could take a Scribe/LaTex style sheets also.  But FrameMaker (like
Scribe) was expensive and originally required a UNIX box with 32-bit linear
addressing to compile, so it was fairly late to the PC.  I never really
learned it although  Ken gave me a copy early on to play with.  IIRC our
doc folks at Stellar used it (whereas the Masscomp/ORA folks of the time
were strictly roff as previously discussed).



> But one could argue that Scribe sort of exists in a way, in LaTeX. My
> understanding is that Leslie Lamport started LaTex as exactly a way
> to bring Scribe’s ideas to producing TeX documents, and the basic
> LaTeX structure looks a lot like Scribe.
>
Indeed - that is what I have been told.  I am under the impression that
early on when Brian started as a Stanford Prof, he had difficulty getting a
use license from Unilogic even though he was the original author.
That churn supposedly somehow influenced Leslie WRT to the creation of
LaTex to make Tex more accessible.



>
> Because you can dive into TeX to tweak all the tiny details, and
> because LaTeX packages work at all different levels of abstraction,
> it’s sometimes hard to see the separation there, especially when
> you’re fighting with LaTeX to submit a paper. But it’s the Scribe
> idea at the core.
>
+1

FWIW I was back at CMU a couple of winters ago for the annual 'Build-18'
maker event.  I was chatting with some folks about a few of the cool things
we had worked on in the  70's and which ones had lasted, like the PQCC, the
speech recognition work, Mach, Andrew *et al*.  At that time, I was told
then that there was a linux x86 binary for Scribe still floating around and
some people still used it for some specific documents.  I asked if I could
get a copy to play with and they told me they would try to find it, but
that was right before Covidtide.  It's been crickets since I inquired.
I'll see if I can find out more.

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* Re: [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix
  2022-01-13 14:56   ` Clem Cole
@ 2022-01-13 15:08     ` John P. Linderman
  2022-01-13 16:06       ` Clem Cole
  2022-01-13 15:35     ` Dan Cross
  2022-01-13 22:53     ` David Arnold
  2 siblings, 1 reply; 29+ messages in thread
From: John P. Linderman @ 2022-01-13 15:08 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Clem Cole; +Cc: Computer Old Farts Followers


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On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 9:57 AM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

> below.... [excellent job -- you wrote what I had planned -- few
> tweeks/color added below].
>
> On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 10:31 PM Win Treese <treese@acm.org> wrote:
>
>> Scribe was in the mix after troff and TeX.
>
> Fun fact, I believe that bwk was Brian's thesis committee
>
>
>> Brian Reid’s observation was that writers should be writing, and
>> publishing professionals should design how documents look.
>
>
>>
Many of us who wrote articles for the Bell System Technical Journal would
disagree. The BSTJ  publishers could transform something that made sense
when viewed as troff output into unintelligible gibberish. You cannot split
a UNIX command line into multiple lines just because it "looks better".
Sometimes format really matters.

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* Re: [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix
  2022-01-13 14:56   ` Clem Cole
  2022-01-13 15:08     ` John P. Linderman
@ 2022-01-13 15:35     ` Dan Cross
  2022-01-13 16:02       ` Warner Losh
  2022-01-13 16:13       ` Charles H Sauer
  2022-01-13 22:53     ` David Arnold
  2 siblings, 2 replies; 29+ messages in thread
From: Dan Cross @ 2022-01-13 15:35 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Clem Cole; +Cc: Computer Old Farts Followers


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On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 9:57 AM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 10:31 PM Win Treese <treese@acm.org> wrote:
>
>> [snip]
>
> The software was commercially available on UNIX and other systems for
>> some time from a company called Unilogic, later Scribe Systems,
>
> There is a long (and somewhat nasty history history here).  Mike Shamus
> was a one-time CMU CS prof.   He created Unilogic and arranged for the IP
> to be transferred to him.   They had a transpiler that converted
> 'compatible BLISS' (*a.k.a*. Vax Bliss) to other languages.  I believe
> that a flavor of Pascal, Ada and C were possible outputs.   I'm not sure of
> the provenance of the transpiler.   Contemporary with Scribe was the PQCC
> project - Product Quality Compiler Compiler, that Wulf and his students
> were working.  That work forked Tartan labs around the same time as
> Unilogic and I know transpilers had been part of the original work, but I
> never closed the loop.  To be honest they had to have been related in
> some manner, but that all happened after I had left.
>
> At that point, Scribe had been converted from the original PDP-10 version
> to compatible BLISS on VAX/VMS.   Unilogic sold versions of Scribe for
> TOPS, Vax both VMS and Unix, Sun, Apollo and I believe a number of other
> systems (maybe HP and AIX).  The sad part is that history seems to have
> lost both Scribe and the associated transpiler (if anyone knows otherwise,
> I'd love to hear something).
>

I understand that Stallman was deeply affected by both the closed nature of
and "time bombs" in Scribe.


> [snip]
>
> To give ex-CMU and UCB grad, Ken Keller credit. He tried to bridge that
> with his FrameMaker program (which I think Adobe still owns - I have not
> seen much about it in few years and have lost track of Keller).  IIRC Ken's
> program could take a Scribe/LaTex style sheets also.  But FrameMaker (like
> Scribe) was expensive and originally required a UNIX box with 32-bit linear
> addressing to compile, so it was fairly late to the PC.  I never really
> learned it although  Ken gave me a copy early on to play with.  IIRC our
> doc folks at Stellar used it (whereas the Masscomp/ORA folks of the time
> were strictly roff as previously discussed).
>

Does anyone have any experience with Interleaf? That was another in the
lineage of document processors that seems to have fallen into history.

But one could argue that Scribe sort of exists in a way, in LaTeX. My
>> understanding is that Leslie Lamport started LaTex as exactly a way
>> to bring Scribe’s ideas to producing TeX documents, and the basic
>> LaTeX structure looks a lot like Scribe.
>>
> Indeed - that is what I have been told.  I am under the impression that
> early on when Brian started as a Stanford Prof, he had difficulty getting a
> use license from Unilogic even though he was the original author.
> That churn supposedly somehow influenced Leslie WRT to the creation of
> LaTex to make Tex more accessible.
>

Texinfo was supposedly developed as an alternative to Scribe specifically;
I know Arnold has said he really likes it for writing books. I wonder what
the connection between texinfo and latex is, if any at all.

To bring it back to Unix, troff et al are obvious examples of the Unix
philosophy applied to document preparation, while TeX and its progeny have
always felt very foreign to me. They work, of course, but in a way that
feels discordant with respect to the aesthetic of the system. Of course,
TeX originated on the SAIL system, so that makes sense: the PDP-10 world
had different sensibilities than the Unix world. One wonders whether, if
Knuth had been working on a Unix machine instead of SAIL, whether TeX would
have been as chatty as it is; I suspect not.

        - Dan C.

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* Re: [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix
  2022-01-13 15:35     ` Dan Cross
@ 2022-01-13 16:02       ` Warner Losh
  2022-01-13 16:20         ` Clem Cole
  2022-01-13 18:16         ` Dan Cross
  2022-01-13 16:13       ` Charles H Sauer
  1 sibling, 2 replies; 29+ messages in thread
From: Warner Losh @ 2022-01-13 16:02 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Dan Cross; +Cc: Computer Old Farts Followers


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On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 8:36 AM Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 9:57 AM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 10:31 PM Win Treese <treese@acm.org> wrote:
>>
>>> [snip]
>>
>> The software was commercially available on UNIX and other systems for
>>> some time from a company called Unilogic, later Scribe Systems,
>>
>> There is a long (and somewhat nasty history history here).  Mike Shamus
>> was a one-time CMU CS prof.   He created Unilogic and arranged for the IP
>> to be transferred to him.   They had a transpiler that converted
>> 'compatible BLISS' (*a.k.a*. Vax Bliss) to other languages.  I believe
>> that a flavor of Pascal, Ada and C were possible outputs.   I'm not sure of
>> the provenance of the transpiler.   Contemporary with Scribe was the PQCC
>> project - Product Quality Compiler Compiler, that Wulf and his students
>> were working.  That work forked Tartan labs around the same time as
>> Unilogic and I know transpilers had been part of the original work, but I
>> never closed the loop.  To be honest they had to have been related in
>> some manner, but that all happened after I had left.
>>
>> At that point, Scribe had been converted from the original PDP-10 version
>> to compatible BLISS on VAX/VMS.   Unilogic sold versions of Scribe for
>> TOPS, Vax both VMS and Unix, Sun, Apollo and I believe a number of other
>> systems (maybe HP and AIX).  The sad part is that history seems to have
>> lost both Scribe and the associated transpiler (if anyone knows otherwise,
>> I'd love to hear something).
>>
>
> I understand that Stallman was deeply affected by both the closed nature
> of and "time bombs" in Scribe.
>
>
>> [snip]
>>
>> To give ex-CMU and UCB grad, Ken Keller credit. He tried to bridge that
>> with his FrameMaker program (which I think Adobe still owns - I have not
>> seen much about it in few years and have lost track of Keller).  IIRC Ken's
>> program could take a Scribe/LaTex style sheets also.  But FrameMaker (like
>> Scribe) was expensive and originally required a UNIX box with 32-bit linear
>> addressing to compile, so it was fairly late to the PC.  I never really
>> learned it although  Ken gave me a copy early on to play with.  IIRC our
>> doc folks at Stellar used it (whereas the Masscomp/ORA folks of the time
>> were strictly roff as previously discussed).
>>
>
> Does anyone have any experience with Interleaf? That was another in the
> lineage of document processors that seems to have fallen into history.
>
> But one could argue that Scribe sort of exists in a way, in LaTeX. My
>>> understanding is that Leslie Lamport started LaTex as exactly a way
>>> to bring Scribe’s ideas to producing TeX documents, and the basic
>>> LaTeX structure looks a lot like Scribe.
>>>
>> Indeed - that is what I have been told.  I am under the impression that
>> early on when Brian started as a Stanford Prof, he had difficulty getting a
>> use license from Unilogic even though he was the original author.
>> That churn supposedly somehow influenced Leslie WRT to the creation of
>> LaTex to make Tex more accessible.
>>
>
> Texinfo was supposedly developed as an alternative to Scribe specifically;
> I know Arnold has said he really likes it for writing books. I wonder what
> the connection between texinfo and latex is, if any at all.
>

You can best view them as -ms vs -me. Two different sets of macros to
markup the text with semantic information that's then turned into useful
rendering by a variety of ways. texinfo and latex are completely unrelated
at a code level. LaTeX predates texinfo by some time (I've not looked it
up, but I encountered LaTeX years before texinfo, though it's possible I
just ignored it when working on bringing up GNU Emacs on VMS 5.mumble back
in the day). It was always my impression that texinfo came more from the
ITS info file world and that the TeX bits were initially just a hack
because it was also on those machines...  It would be interesting to hear
from people that were there.


> To bring it back to Unix, troff et al are obvious examples of the Unix
> philosophy applied to document preparation, while TeX and its progeny have
> always felt very foreign to me. They work, of course, but in a way that
> feels discordant with respect to the aesthetic of the system. Of course,
> TeX originated on the SAIL system, so that makes sense: the PDP-10 world
> had different sensibilities than the Unix world. One wonders whether, if
> Knuth had been working on a Unix machine instead of SAIL, whether TeX would
> have been as chatty as it is; I suspect not.
>

Likely not. It was only slightly odd to me because our school moved from
TOPS-20 to SunOS and 4.{2,3}BSD (maybe others, don't know when the VAX was
delivered: it was just there when I arrived with a boatload of HP terminals
attached to it which I thought odd). It's quite TOPS-20-y in a lot of what
it does. That seemed perfectly natural to me when I started using it.

Warner

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* Re: [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix
  2022-01-13 15:08     ` John P. Linderman
@ 2022-01-13 16:06       ` Clem Cole
  2022-01-13 16:24         ` Warner Losh
                           ` (2 more replies)
  0 siblings, 3 replies; 29+ messages in thread
From: Clem Cole @ 2022-01-13 16:06 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: John P. Linderman; +Cc: Computer Old Farts Followers


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On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 10:08 AM John P. Linderman <jpl.jpl@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Many of us who wrote articles for the Bell System Technical Journal would
> disagree. The BSTJ  publishers could transform something that made sense
> when viewed as troff output into unintelligible gibberish. You cannot split
> a UNIX command line into multiple lines just because it "looks better".
> Sometimes format really matters.
>
I think that is true for any scheme -- professionals and editors need to
work together.  That's what Jon was suggesting.  When they don't have
shared vocabulary/goals -  bad things can happen.   FWIW: I can not speak
for him directly as I never had this conversation with him (Win might
have), but from what I knew/know of Brian Ried I think he might agree with
what I'm suggesting.  IMO, *there will always be cases like the one that
you described*.  This is not particular to any document compiler system.
The question is how to bring the two sides together and who has the high
order bit?

My complaint with Word and the like, is that the 'control' is hidden.  It's
$%^& magic -- why is it indenting here?  Hey I did not tell it to make it
go italics ...

Like Jon and Larry, I'm a big roff fan and still use it.  But to give Brian
his due, his style sheets were in ASCII and what was happening on the page
was fairly easy to deduce.  That said, I never used Scribe for anything
large (like a book), which I can say I have done with troff.  In the late
1970s, I did use Scribe for some papers and found it quite easy to use.
Since that time, as a co-author I've also tried the same with LaTex and/or
Word and found both difficult.  When I have the lead and if I can, I'll use
troff -ms with a few extra Masscomp macros (that ORA used to pass on too --
the Steve Talbot extensions for lists in particular).

So from my professional experience, it has been mostly with troff, my use
of Scribe was short lived.

I'm pretty sure tht Keller tried to make creating books easier in
FrameMaker, as that was one of his target users.  But again I only played
with it, never really had to rely on it for anything.

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread

* Re: [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix
  2022-01-13 15:35     ` Dan Cross
  2022-01-13 16:02       ` Warner Losh
@ 2022-01-13 16:13       ` Charles H Sauer
  1 sibling, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread
From: Charles H Sauer @ 2022-01-13 16:13 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: coff



On 1/13/2022 9:35 AM, Dan Cross wrote:

> Does anyone have any experience with Interleaf? That was another in the 
> lineage of document processors that seems to have fallen into history.

Interleaf was a favorite on AIX, starting with the initial RT release. 
At Dell, we used the DOS version of Interleaf extensively internally, 
and I used it for charts for classroom presentations when I was an 
adjunct at UTCS. I still have that version and can view those charts.

Some descendant of Interleaf seems to exist as BroadVision Quicksilver, 
but I haven't used Interleaf since leaving Dell.

-- 
voice: +1.512.784.7526       e-mail: sauer@technologists.com
fax: +1.512.346.5240         Web: https://technologists.com/sauer/
Facebook/Google/Twitter: CharlesHSauer
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* Re: [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix
  2022-01-13 16:02       ` Warner Losh
@ 2022-01-13 16:20         ` Clem Cole
  2022-01-13 16:32           ` Warner Losh
  2022-01-13 16:42           ` Lars Brinkhoff
  2022-01-13 18:16         ` Dan Cross
  1 sibling, 2 replies; 29+ messages in thread
From: Clem Cole @ 2022-01-13 16:20 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Warner Losh; +Cc: Computer Old Farts Followers


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On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 11:03 AM Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:

> You can best view them as -ms vs -me. Two different sets of macros to
> markup the text with semantic information that's then turned into useful
> rendering by a variety of ways. texinfo and latex are completely unrelated
> at a code level. LaTeX predates texinfo by some time (I've not looked it
> up, but I encountered LaTeX years before texinfo, though it's possible I
> just ignored it when working on bringing up GNU Emacs on VMS 5.mumble back
> in the day). It was always my impression that texinfo came more from the
> ITS info file world and that the TeX bits were initially just a hack
> because it was also on those machines...  It would be interesting to hear
> from people that were there.
>
That was always my impression.   Stallman hated troff (and man) because it
was not integrated into EMACS (his operating system).  I always got the
impression that texinfo was more of a shot against man pages and trying to
push the purity of the 'ITS-way' to Unix.  And of course the problem became
the more he did that, the less use texinfo became except for anyone that
followed his gospel.  As Unix became the mainstream, it meant information
for any gnu tools was (is) disjoint.  If rms had been willing to just
accept the man command itself, I suspect that would not have been.

To be fair, its not an unusual behavior.  Folks coming from VMS (or
windows) try to make Unix look like that.  And what did we do with VMS, we
added the cshell and Unix tools so people like me could type on it.   I'm
currently being driven nuts by the simh tool which has a very TOPS/VMS
style feel.  Everything is help commands. The documents are quite sparse.
To me the documents/book (or man pages) should primarily ' go to' and if
you want something like 'help' then create it from the documents.  But I
can not really complain. It's a wonderful tool and its author comes from
that heritage not Unix.  The problem I remind him is that he will get silly
questions from people like me, because we can not find things in his help
system - its just not how a Unix program tends to work [I want to look in
the index of the document, and find the section myself].

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread

* Re: [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix
  2022-01-13 16:06       ` Clem Cole
@ 2022-01-13 16:24         ` Warner Losh
  2022-01-13 16:39         ` Harald Arnesen
  2022-01-13 18:00         ` Bakul Shah
  2 siblings, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread
From: Warner Losh @ 2022-01-13 16:24 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Clem Cole; +Cc: Computer Old Farts Followers


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On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 9:06 AM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 10:08 AM John P. Linderman <jpl.jpl@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Many of us who wrote articles for the Bell System Technical Journal would
>> disagree. The BSTJ  publishers could transform something that made sense
>> when viewed as troff output into unintelligible gibberish. You cannot split
>> a UNIX command line into multiple lines just because it "looks better".
>> Sometimes format really matters.
>>
> I think that is true for any scheme -- professionals and editors need to
> work together.  That's what Jon was suggesting.  When they don't have
> shared vocabulary/goals -  bad things can happen.   FWIW: I can not speak
> for him directly as I never had this conversation with him (Win might
> have), but from what I knew/know of Brian Ried I think he might agree with
> what I'm suggesting.  IMO, *there will always be cases like the one that
> you described*.  This is not particular to any document compiler system.
>   The question is how to bring the two sides together and who has the high
> order bit?
>
> My complaint with Word and the like, is that the 'control' is hidden.
> It's $%^& magic -- why is it indenting here?  Hey I did not tell it to make
> it go italics ...
>

Yea. There's a balance here: the number of people that tweak things because
they can is quite large. and often the tweaks need to be undone because
they look like @#^@^ to the professional typesetter (I guess they'd call
this the publisher these days). There also needs to be some way to flag the
legit "your defaults got this so wrong my readers will trip over this"
bits. That's lacking in Word, for example. I've seen other systems cope
with this to varying degrees of success.

I've used LaTeX for all my professional papers. With the proper style
guides, I can easily transport the words from one style requirement to
another. However, I run into issues all the time when I go from conference
A that has a single column to conference B that has the dual columns of
IEEE. Where diagrams fit and are pleasing to the eye in one, they look
awkward and out of place in the other. Etc. So this ideal one can approach,
but there will always be bits of bricabrack that can't be easily handled by
the automation. While most of the issues can be delegated to the macros,
some manual tweaking is necessary because there are many works that are
more than just a big bag of words with semantic metadata attached.

I never got into troff. It always seemed lower level than LaTeX to me when
I was learning things, and I didn't want to be bothered with those details.
I can read and use it today, but it's not my primary choice unless I'm
tweaking a work already in troff.

Warner

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread

* Re: [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix
  2022-01-13  3:26 ` Theodore Ts'o
@ 2022-01-13 16:25   ` Larry McVoy
  2022-01-13 16:33   ` Dan Cross
  1 sibling, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread
From: Larry McVoy @ 2022-01-13 16:25 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Theodore Ts'o; +Cc: coff

On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 10:26:10PM -0500, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> Speaking of typesetting equations, how would people compare eqn versus
> LaTeX?  I used nroff for man pages, but I never did learn how to use
> eqn for nroff.

I love the tbl|eqn|pic|grap (though that is in theory, I wrote my own)
preprocessors.  I've done a ton of tbl & pic, there are some historical
bugs that I'd like to get fixed, but for the most part they work great.
eqn I've used and made pretty math stuff but I haven't used the LaTex
version.  Somewhere I heard someone grabbed the eqn source and massaged
it for LaTex but I have no idea if that was true.

I'm especially fond of pic, you can write pic and "see" the picture
in your head if you do it right.  I'm pretty sure I know why it works
like that, I bet it was slow and expensive to get a print out so the
more you could get it to be correct in your head, the better.
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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread

* Re: [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix
  2022-01-13 16:20         ` Clem Cole
@ 2022-01-13 16:32           ` Warner Losh
  2022-01-13 16:42           ` Lars Brinkhoff
  1 sibling, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread
From: Warner Losh @ 2022-01-13 16:32 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Clem Cole; +Cc: Computer Old Farts Followers


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On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 9:20 AM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

> To be fair, its not an unusual behavior.  Folks coming from VMS (or
> windows) try to make Unix look like that.  And what did we do with VMS, we
> added the cshell and Unix tools so people like me could type on it.   I'm
> currently being driven nuts by the simh tool which has a very TOPS/VMS
> style feel.  Everything is help commands. The documents are quite sparse.
> To me the documents/book (or man pages) should primarily ' go to' and if
> you want something like 'help' then create it from the documents.  But I
> can not really complain. It's a wonderful tool and its author comes from
> that heritage not Unix.  The problem I remind him is that he will get silly
> questions from people like me, because we can not find things in his help
> system - its just not how a Unix program tends to work [I want to look in
> the index of the document, and find the section myself].
>

The different worldviews are instructive. c-kermit had a tops-20 cmd
JSYS built into it and all the escape completion just worked. The  help was
quite good, but as with most help systems it was a zoomed in on some
hyperspecific topic. For that it was usually good (across all the TOPS-20
and VMS and that ilk), but sometimes you got things like "/GERBILS
specifies the gerbils to use" without really telling you what a gerbil was
in this context. what you didn't get was how things held together (eg
/HAMSTERS and /GERBILS worked hand in hand to control parameters to the
rodent models used to generate the ecosystem) or some of the higher level
concepts (like what an ecosystem was).

I used to read the raw VMS help files. They were a verbose version of the
Unix manuals in some ways, though less crisp in others. It was helpful to
read it all to understand, but even so some important concepts were
omitted, or discussed elsewhere w/o a proper cross reference.

Warner

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread

* Re: [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix
  2022-01-13  3:26 ` Theodore Ts'o
  2022-01-13 16:25   ` Larry McVoy
@ 2022-01-13 16:33   ` Dan Cross
  2022-01-13 22:19     ` David Arnold
  1 sibling, 1 reply; 29+ messages in thread
From: Dan Cross @ 2022-01-13 16:33 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Theodore Ts'o; +Cc: Computer Old Farts Followers


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On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 10:32 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:

> Speaking of typesetting equations, how would people compare eqn versus
> LaTeX?  I used nroff for man pages, but I never did learn how to use
> eqn for nroff.
>

I hate to be the one who says this, but when it comes to typesetting
non-trivial mathematics, there is no competition: LaTeX beats eqn hands
down. eqn is fine up to a point (and the neqn thing is kinda nifty for
simple things on the terminal; you can kinda sorta get a rendered sigma for
a summation, for example) but it breaks down pretty quickly.

        - Dan C.

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* Re: [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix
  2022-01-13 13:54 ` Adam Sampson
@ 2022-01-13 16:37   ` Lars Brinkhoff
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread
From: Lars Brinkhoff @ 2022-01-13 16:37 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Adam Sampson; +Cc: coff

Adam Sampson wrote:
> josh wrote:
>> [...] Brian Reid's Scribe system [...] Does it exist at all today?
> SAIL's copy of the Scribe source code is in the SAILDART archive:
>   https://saildart.org/[SCR,SYS]/

There is also a copy on MIT backup tapes.

A while back I asked Reid's opinion about putting the sources online.
He remarked he doesn't really have a say in that since he sold Scribe to
a company, but that he wouldn't mind.
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* Re: [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix
  2022-01-13 16:06       ` Clem Cole
  2022-01-13 16:24         ` Warner Losh
@ 2022-01-13 16:39         ` Harald Arnesen
  2022-01-13 18:00         ` Bakul Shah
  2 siblings, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread
From: Harald Arnesen @ 2022-01-13 16:39 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: coff

Clem Cole [13/01/2022 17.06]:

> My complaint with Word and the like, is that the 'control' is hidden. 
> It's $%^& magic -- why is it indenting here?  Hey I did not tell it to 
> make it go italics ...

That's the main reason I used WordPerfect instead, when I had to deliver 
my work in Microsoft Word format (about 1990-2000). WordPerfect has a 
"reveal codes" command, which makes it possible to see why the text 
suddenly is in italics...

And it could/can save in Word format, which my editors demanded.
-- 
Hilsen Harald
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* Re: [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix
  2022-01-13 16:20         ` Clem Cole
  2022-01-13 16:32           ` Warner Losh
@ 2022-01-13 16:42           ` Lars Brinkhoff
  2022-01-13 16:52             ` Larry McVoy
  1 sibling, 1 reply; 29+ messages in thread
From: Lars Brinkhoff @ 2022-01-13 16:42 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Clem Cole; +Cc: Computer Old Farts Followers

Clem Cole wrote:
> I always got the impression that texinfo was more of a shot against
> man pages and trying to push the purity of the 'ITS-way' to Unix.

ITS had a hypertext documentation system, so my assumtion would be that
RMS wanted to bring along that to the GNU vision.  I don't see that's it
would be abount purity, whatever that would mean for documentation.
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* Re: [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix
  2022-01-13 16:42           ` Lars Brinkhoff
@ 2022-01-13 16:52             ` Larry McVoy
  2022-01-13 16:54               ` Clem Cole
  2022-01-13 17:06               ` Clem Cole
  0 siblings, 2 replies; 29+ messages in thread
From: Larry McVoy @ 2022-01-13 16:52 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Lars Brinkhoff; +Cc: Computer Old Farts Followers

On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 04:42:53PM +0000, Lars Brinkhoff wrote:
> Clem Cole wrote:
> > I always got the impression that texinfo was more of a shot against
> > man pages and trying to push the purity of the 'ITS-way' to Unix.
> 
> ITS had a hypertext documentation system, so my assumtion would be that
> RMS wanted to bring along that to the GNU vision.  I don't see that's it
> would be abount purity, whatever that would mean for documentation.

So you know how when you go into someone else's program to fix a bug and
they have a hideous coding style?  Have you ever had someone else fix a
bug in your code and they reformat everything so git blame looks like
they wrote the whole thing?  That's rude, right?  If you were fixing 
the bug in some crappy coding style, you fix it in that crappy coding
style, it's not your style but it is the polite thing to do.

If we agree on that then we can move on to RMS and texinfo.  Providing
texinfo docs for Unix commands is like reformatting the code.  It's 
rude.  The Unix way is man pages for basic usage and a user guide, 
usually in -ms.  Not doing it that way is trying to change the way
the system works and it's just rude.

If I were working on ITS and techinfo is how they do their docs, that's
how I'd do docs there, it would be rude to force man pages on system
that doesn't work that way.
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* Re: [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix
  2022-01-13 16:52             ` Larry McVoy
@ 2022-01-13 16:54               ` Clem Cole
  2022-01-13 17:06               ` Clem Cole
  1 sibling, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread
From: Clem Cole @ 2022-01-13 16:54 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Larry McVoy; +Cc: Computer Old Farts Followers


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On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 11:52 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 04:42:53PM +0000, Lars Brinkhoff wrote:
> > Clem Cole wrote:
> > > I always got the impression that texinfo was more of a shot against
> > > man pages and trying to push the purity of the 'ITS-way' to Unix.
> >
> > ITS had a hypertext documentation system, so my assumtion would be that
> > RMS wanted to bring along that to the GNU vision.  I don't see that's it
> > would be abount purity, whatever that would mean for documentation.
>
> So you know how when you go into someone else's program to fix a bug and
> they have a hideous coding style?  Have you ever had someone else fix a
> bug in your code and they reformat everything so git blame looks like
> they wrote the whole thing?  That's rude, right?  If you were fixing
> the bug in some crappy coding style, you fix it in that crappy coding
> style, it's not your style but it is the polite thing to do.
>
> If we agree on that then we can move on to RMS and texinfo.  Providing
> texinfo docs for Unix commands is like reformatting the code.  It's
> rude.  The Unix way is man pages for basic usage and a user guide,
> usually in -ms.  Not doing it that way is trying to change the way
> the system works and it's just rude.
>
> If I were working on ITS and techinfo is how they do their docs, that's
> how I'd do docs there, it would be rude to force man pages on system
> that doesn't work that way.
>
Amen bro ... Amen

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* Re: [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix
  2022-01-13 16:52             ` Larry McVoy
  2022-01-13 16:54               ` Clem Cole
@ 2022-01-13 17:06               ` Clem Cole
  1 sibling, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread
From: Clem Cole @ 2022-01-13 17:06 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Larry McVoy; +Cc: Computer Old Farts Followers


[-- Attachment #1.1: Type: text/plain, Size: 643 bytes --]

On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 11:52 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> If you were fixing the bug in some crappy coding style, you fix it in
> that crappy coding style, it's not your style but it is the polite thing
> to do.
>
It's like moving to foreign country and not learning the local language and
customs.   I understand using a crutch for the occasional user, which is
what I used when I had to come back to VMS -- I knew enough to be
dangerous, but I made fewer errors if I personally have a cshell not Dave's
Command Language.   Or for windows, I dislike, but I can use if I have too,
but I'm happy l to have WSL when I need it.

Clem

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* Re: [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix
  2022-01-13 16:06       ` Clem Cole
  2022-01-13 16:24         ` Warner Losh
  2022-01-13 16:39         ` Harald Arnesen
@ 2022-01-13 18:00         ` Bakul Shah
  2 siblings, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread
From: Bakul Shah @ 2022-01-13 18:00 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Clem Cole; +Cc: Computer Old Farts Followers


[-- Attachment #1.1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2140 bytes --]



> On Jan 13, 2022, at 8:06 AM, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 10:08 AM John P. Linderman <jpl.jpl@gmail.com <mailto:jpl.jpl@gmail.com>> wrote:
> Many of us who wrote articles for the Bell System Technical Journal would disagree. The BSTJ  publishers could transform something that made sense when viewed as troff output into unintelligible gibberish. You cannot split a UNIX command line into multiple lines just because it "looks better". Sometimes format really matters.
> I think that is true for any scheme -- professionals and editors need to work together.  That's what Jon was suggesting.  When they don't have shared vocabulary/goals -  bad things can happen.   FWIW: I can not speak for him directly as I never had this conversation with him (Win might have), but from what I knew/know of Brian Ried I think he might agree with what I'm suggesting.  IMO, there will always be cases like the one that you described.  This is not particular to any document compiler system.   The question is how to bring the two sides together and who has the high order bit? 

In one of his blogposts Douglas Crockford has suggested that Scribe would have made a better declarative markup language than SGML!

If you read Bibtex's manual they talk about <some feature> being put in for SCRIBE compatibility. Even the bibliographic reference form looks SCRIBE-like. For example,

@Article{Arrabito:EPODD-1-2-117,
  author =       "R. Arrabito and H. J{\"{u}}rgensen",
  title =        "Computerized {Braille} Typesetting: Another View of Mark-up Standards",
  journal =      j-EPODD,
  year =         "1988",
  volume =       "1",
  number =       "2",
  pages =        "117--132",
  month =        sep,
}

But in a sense the Scribe markup is at a different level than troff or TeX. LaTeX is more declarative, which is one of the reasons for people preferring it to pure TeX.

> My complaint with Word and the like, is that the 'control' is hidden.  It's $%^& magic -- why is it indenting here?  Hey I did not tell it to make it go italics ...

Word is lower level than TeX/troff. 

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* Re: [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix
  2022-01-13 16:02       ` Warner Losh
  2022-01-13 16:20         ` Clem Cole
@ 2022-01-13 18:16         ` Dan Cross
  2022-01-13 20:00           ` Larry McVoy
  2022-01-13 20:26           ` Chet Ramey
  1 sibling, 2 replies; 29+ messages in thread
From: Dan Cross @ 2022-01-13 18:16 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Warner Losh; +Cc: Computer Old Farts Followers


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On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 11:03 AM Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 8:36 AM Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> [snip]
>> Texinfo was supposedly developed as an alternative to Scribe
>> specifically; I know Arnold has said he really likes it for writing books.
>> I wonder what the connection between texinfo and latex is, if any at all.
>>
>
> You can best view them as -ms vs -me. Two different sets of macros to
> markup the text with semantic information that's then turned into useful
> rendering by a variety of ways. texinfo and latex are completely unrelated
> at a code level.
>

Oh sure, but I didn't mean in the sense of code, but rather,
philosophically and design-wise. Both seem to be influenced by Scribe's
idea of separation of content and presentation (an idea reinvented a decade
later in HTML+CSS).

LaTeX predates texinfo by some time (I've not looked it up, but I
> encountered LaTeX years before texinfo, though it's possible I just ignored
> it when working on bringing up GNU Emacs on VMS 5.mumble back in the day).
>

There's some documentation available for both:
https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/html_node/History.html
Paraphrasing that document, MIT had a thing called Bolio which evolved into
BoTeX. Independently, Stallman created the "info" format (for ITS perhaps?)
and then BoTeX and Info merged to become texinfo, with the stated goal of
producing both online and printed representations from a single source
document. The earliest texinfo formatter was written in Emacs Lisp. BoTeX
seems to date from late 1984, but this doesn't put a date on the creation
of texinfo. It _does_ mention `makeinfo` in "the early 90s", so we may
assume sometime after 1984 and before 1992? `texinfo.el` from the Emacs
18.29 distribution has copyright dates from 1985, 1988, but it's hard to
make out the actual provenance of the source in those files (ie, was the
1985 date due to that file being copied from an earlier file created in
1985?).

It's somewhat harder to nail down the exact history of LaTeX; Lamport has
this: http://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/pubs.html#latex which seems to
indicate that, while "LaTeX: A Document Preparation System" was published
in 1986, he had been working on it for at least two or three years before
that. https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/lamport-latex-interview.pdf
mentions that he started using TeX ca 1979, but doesn't mention when he
actually created LaTeX. He goes on to say that he was using a macro package
by Max Diaz and thought he could do better "when Don was creating
TeX80(?)". I'd guess that means this is in the 1980-81 timeframe? It goes
on to say that he moved to DEC in 1985 and never used *roff (I assume he at
least poked at it and take that to mean he was never a serious user).

It was always my impression that texinfo came more from the ITS info file
> world and that the TeX bits were initially just a hack because it was also
> on those machines...  It would be interesting to hear from people that were
> there.
>

Info definitely came from that world. Texinfo as the marriage of BoTeX as a
Scribe-a-like and Info as an online help format seem less like a hack and
more deliberate.


> To bring it back to Unix, troff et al are obvious examples of the Unix
>> philosophy applied to document preparation, while TeX and its progeny have
>> always felt very foreign to me. They work, of course, but in a way that
>> feels discordant with respect to the aesthetic of the system. Of course,
>> TeX originated on the SAIL system, so that makes sense: the PDP-10 world
>> had different sensibilities than the Unix world. One wonders whether, if
>> Knuth had been working on a Unix machine instead of SAIL, whether TeX would
>> have been as chatty as it is; I suspect not.
>>
>
> Likely not. It was only slightly odd to me because our school moved from
> TOPS-20 to SunOS and 4.{2,3}BSD (maybe others, don't know when the VAX was
> delivered: it was just there when I arrived with a boatload of HP terminals
> attached to it which I thought odd).
>

Which part was weird? The HP terminals?

It's quite TOPS-20-y in a lot of what it does. That seemed perfectly
> natural to me when I started using it.
>

Or at least SAIL-y, but it seems like the PDP-10 systems had a lot of
cross-pollination between them, possibly due to the shared lineage from the
PDP-6 monitor and associated DEC tools like DDT?

        - Dan C.

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread

* Re: [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix
  2022-01-13 18:16         ` Dan Cross
@ 2022-01-13 20:00           ` Larry McVoy
  2022-01-13 20:26           ` Chet Ramey
  1 sibling, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread
From: Larry McVoy @ 2022-01-13 20:00 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Dan Cross; +Cc: Computer Old Farts Followers

On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 01:16:42PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote:
> Oh sure, but I didn't mean in the sense of code, but rather,
> philosophically and design-wise. Both seem to be influenced by Scribe's
> idea of separation of content and presentation (an idea reinvented a decade
> later in HTML+CSS).

Funny, Marc Donner, then at Morgan Stanley, was sort of a mentor of mine.
One day I was discussing with him all the stuff I had done with *roff
-ms input, I have scripts to make html slides out of that, another that
makes a web site with a site map.

I told him that I really liked it but wasn't sure why.  He said "You
like it because that macro packages says what to do without exposing
how.  That makes it easy to write scripts to spit out in some other
format".  True dat.
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* Re: [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix
  2022-01-13 18:16         ` Dan Cross
  2022-01-13 20:00           ` Larry McVoy
@ 2022-01-13 20:26           ` Chet Ramey
  1 sibling, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread
From: Chet Ramey @ 2022-01-13 20:26 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Dan Cross, Warner Losh; +Cc: Computer Old Farts Followers

On 1/13/22 1:16 PM, Dan Cross wrote:

> It _does_ mention `makeinfo` in "the early 90s", so we may 
> assume sometime after 1984 and before 1992? `texinfo.el` from the Emacs 
> 18.29 distribution has copyright dates from 1985, 1988, but it's hard to 
> make out the actual provenance of the source in those files (ie, was the 
> 1985 date due to that file being copied from an earlier file created in 1985?).

Brian Fox wrote the original version of GNU `info' and the first standalone
C version of `makeinfo' in 1987, right after he started working for the 
FSF. (makeinfo has since evolved into a perl script.)


-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
		 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/
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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread

* Re: [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix
  2022-01-13 16:33   ` Dan Cross
@ 2022-01-13 22:19     ` David Arnold
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread
From: David Arnold @ 2022-01-13 22:19 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Computer Old Farts Followers


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> On 14 Jan 2022, at 03:33, Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 10:32 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu <mailto:tytso@mit.edu>> wrote:
> Speaking of typesetting equations, how would people compare eqn versus
> LaTeX?  I used nroff for man pages, but I never did learn how to use
> eqn for nroff.
> 
> I hate to be the one who says this, but when it comes to typesetting non-trivial mathematics, there is no competition: LaTeX beats eqn hands down. eqn is fine up to a point (and the neqn thing is kinda nifty for simple things on the terminal; you can kinda sorta get a rendered sigma for a summation, for example) but it breaks down pretty quickly.

Both FrameMaker and Word have GUI equation editors.  They’re pretty capable, but are a separate “world” from the text: they open a new window for editing the equation that floats over the document.

I much preferred (I don’t do a lot of equations these days) the inline nature of LaTeX (and (n)eqn)).




d

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* Re: [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix
  2022-01-13 14:56   ` Clem Cole
  2022-01-13 15:08     ` John P. Linderman
  2022-01-13 15:35     ` Dan Cross
@ 2022-01-13 22:53     ` David Arnold
  2022-01-14  1:53       ` Adam Thornton
  2 siblings, 1 reply; 29+ messages in thread
From: David Arnold @ 2022-01-13 22:53 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Computer Old Farts Followers


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> On 14 Jan 2022, at 01:56, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

<…>

> In real publishing, the division still exists: lots of
> writing in, say, Microsoft Word that is reworked in publishing software
> like Quark or InDesign for actual printing.
> To give ex-CMU and UCB grad, Ken Keller credit. He tried to bridge that with his FrameMaker program (which I think Adobe still owns - I have not seen much about it in few years and have lost track of Keller).  IIRC Ken's program could take a Scribe/LaTex style sheets also.  But FrameMaker (like Scribe) was expensive and originally required a UNIX box with 32-bit linear addressing to compile, so it was fairly late to the PC.  I never really learned it although  Ken gave me a copy early on to play with.  IIRC our doc folks at Stellar used it (whereas the Masscomp/ORA folks of the time were strictly roff as previously discussed). 

I used FrameMaker for a while in the early 90’s, (on MIPS Ultrix 4.4, DEC OSF/1 3.2/Digital Unix 4.0/Tru64 5.1, and Solaris 8/9).

It was absolutely targeted at professional document production (vs. word processing), and had a good separation between templates (with all the styling and layout) and documents (which added the content).  It was also good at merging multiple documents into a book and applying consistent style across the collection.

I think the versions I used were still produced by Frame Technology(?) — before it was bought by Adobe anyway.

Ironically, around that same time, Word for Windows 2.0 was IMHO the peak of that product’s functionality, in that while it allowed the user to randomly apply styling to the text, it was the last version that made the template facilities an equal first-class citizen in the UI.  It was almost as easy to define and use “semantic” styles for formatting as it was to just do inline markup.  Version 6 (they went from 2 to 6 in one hop) bent the product firmly towards use by amateurs, with toolbar buttons for bulleted lists, etc, that hid the underlying use of styles, and thus avoided users incrementally learning how to do consistent documents.  From my perspective, every release since has made it worse.

More recently, I’ve used DocBook for producing manuals, etc.   It’s an awful source format, but has the usual advantages of being plain text, generating useful textual diffs, etc.  Cobbling together a production process using DocBook, XSLT, and FOP to emit decent PDF is not for the faint-hearted, and (to circle back to relevance) I always end up questioning whether it’d just be better to use *roff or (La)TeX with a suitable macro package instead.






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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread

* Re: [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix
  2022-01-13 22:53     ` David Arnold
@ 2022-01-14  1:53       ` Adam Thornton
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread
From: Adam Thornton @ 2022-01-14  1:53 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: David Arnold; +Cc: Computer Old Farts Followers


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On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 4:00 PM David Arnold <davida@pobox.com> wrote:

>
> Ironically, around that same time, Word for Windows 2.0 was IMHO the peak
> of that product’s functionality, in that while it allowed the user to
> randomly apply styling to the text, it was the last version that made the
> template facilities an equal first-class citizen in the UI.  It was almost
> as easy to define and use “semantic” styles for formatting as it was to
> just do inline markup.  Version 6 (they went from 2 to 6 in one hop) bent
> the product firmly towards use by amateurs, with toolbar buttons for
> bulleted lists, etc, that hid the underlying use of styles, and thus
> avoided users incrementally learning how to do consistent documents.  From
> my perspective, every release since has made it worse.
>
>
Thank you for saying this.  I agree and I thought I was the only person who
felt that way.

Adam

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2022-01-14  1:53 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 29+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2022-01-13  2:04 [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix josh
2022-01-13  2:03 ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2022-01-13  3:24 ` Win Treese
2022-01-13 14:56   ` Clem Cole
2022-01-13 15:08     ` John P. Linderman
2022-01-13 16:06       ` Clem Cole
2022-01-13 16:24         ` Warner Losh
2022-01-13 16:39         ` Harald Arnesen
2022-01-13 18:00         ` Bakul Shah
2022-01-13 15:35     ` Dan Cross
2022-01-13 16:02       ` Warner Losh
2022-01-13 16:20         ` Clem Cole
2022-01-13 16:32           ` Warner Losh
2022-01-13 16:42           ` Lars Brinkhoff
2022-01-13 16:52             ` Larry McVoy
2022-01-13 16:54               ` Clem Cole
2022-01-13 17:06               ` Clem Cole
2022-01-13 18:16         ` Dan Cross
2022-01-13 20:00           ` Larry McVoy
2022-01-13 20:26           ` Chet Ramey
2022-01-13 16:13       ` Charles H Sauer
2022-01-13 22:53     ` David Arnold
2022-01-14  1:53       ` Adam Thornton
2022-01-13  3:26 ` Theodore Ts'o
2022-01-13 16:25   ` Larry McVoy
2022-01-13 16:33   ` Dan Cross
2022-01-13 22:19     ` David Arnold
2022-01-13 13:54 ` Adam Sampson
2022-01-13 16:37   ` Lars Brinkhoff

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