Re: [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix

[Win Treese <treese@acm.org>]

> 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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