The Unix Heritage Society mailing list
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
* Re: [TUHS] TeX and groff (was: roff(7))
@ 2022-01-12  2:49 Jon Steinhart
  2022-01-12 10:38 ` Ralph Corderoy
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 45+ messages in thread
From: Jon Steinhart @ 2022-01-12  2:49 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: TUHS main list

Been reading the heirloom docs.  Remember one thing that I disliked
about troff which maybe Doug can explain.  It's the language in the
docs.  I never understood "interpolating a register" to have any
relation to the definition of interpolate that I learned in math.
Made it a bit hard to learn initially.

Any memory of why that term was used?

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 45+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] TeX and groff (was: roff(7))
@ 2022-01-13 17:31 Douglas McIlroy
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 45+ messages in thread
From: Douglas McIlroy @ 2022-01-13 17:31 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: TUHS main list

> If I can be so bold as to offer an interpretation: Doug's approximations
> treat ellipses as mathematical objects and algorithmically determine what
> pixels are closest to points on the infinitesimally-thin curves, while
> Knuth's (or one his students') method acknowledges that the curve has a
> width defined by the nib

Just so.

> I find it impossible that neither Knuth nor Hobby were unaware of McIlroy's
> work and vice-versa; of course he would have known about and examined troff
> just as the Bell Labs folks knew about TeX.

We were generally aware of each other's work. My papers on drawing
lines, circles, and ellipses on rasters, though, were barely connected
to troff. Troff did not contain any drawing algorithms. That work was
relegated to the rendering programs that interpreted ditroff output.
Thus publication-quality rendering with support for thick lines was
outsourced to Adobe and Mergenthaler.

Various PostScript or ditroff postprocessors for screen-based
terminals were written in house. These programs paid little or no
attention to fonts and line widths. But the blit renderers made a
tenuous connection between my ellipse algorithm and troff, since my
work on the topic was stimulated by Rob's need for an ellipse
generator.

Doug

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 45+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] TeX and groff (was: roff(7))
@ 2022-01-11 13:37 Nelson H. F. Beebe
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 45+ messages in thread
From: Nelson H. F. Beebe @ 2022-01-11 13:37 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: The Unix Heritage Society mailing list

On the subject of documtation of [nt]roff, no one seems to have
mentioned Narain Gehani's two editions of ``Document Formatting and
Typesetting on the UNIX System'' (700+ pages), and a second two-author
volume that covers grap, mv, ms, and troff.  There is a table of
contents of the second edition recorded here:

	http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/typeset.html#Gehani:1987:DFT

There is an entry in that file for the first edition too

	http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/typeset.html#Gehani:1986:DF

The second volume, co-authored with Steven Lally, is covered here:

	http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/typeset.html#Gehani:1988:DFT

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: beebe@math.utah.edu  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe@acm.org  beebe@computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 45+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] TeX and groff (was: roff(7))
@ 2022-01-10 21:12 Bakul Shah
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 45+ messages in thread
From: Bakul Shah @ 2022-01-10 21:12 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Larry McVoy; +Cc: TUHS main list

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 398 bytes --]


On Jan 10, 2022, at 12:33 PM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> TeX looks better but you instantly know it is
> TeX, it has a particular look.

Perhaps you’re thinking of documents using Computer Modern fonts,
typeset using LaTeX’s document classes. Check out the examples here:
 https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1319/showcase-of-beautiful-typography-done-in-tex-friends


[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 949 bytes --]

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 45+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] TeX and groff (was: roff(7))
@ 2022-01-10 21:06 Jon Steinhart
  2022-01-11 11:06 ` Ralph Corderoy
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 45+ messages in thread
From: Jon Steinhart @ 2022-01-10 21:06 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: TUHS main list

Steffen Nurpmeso writes:
> Note that heirloom doctools (on github) is a SysV-derived *roff

Wow, thanks for mentioning this.  I was unaware of it.  When I
recently wrote that it would be nice to add TeX's 2D formatting
to troff I didn't realize that it had already been done.

Something new to play with.

Jon

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 45+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] roff(7)
@ 2021-12-31 15:47 Douglas McIlroy
  2021-12-31 23:07 ` George Michaelson
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 45+ messages in thread
From: Douglas McIlroy @ 2021-12-31 15:47 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: TUHS main list

> Did roff do all of what troff and nroff did?

No way. Ossanna deserves all the praise you give him. Roff extended
runoff in various ways:
     relative numeric operators, e.g. .in +8
     tabbing (left, right and centered)
     underlining
     tripartite headers and footers
     arabic and roman page numbering
     adjustable head and foot margins
     automatic hyphenation, thanks to Molly Wagner
     footnotes
     merge patterns for change marks, column separators, etc.
     various special requests: .ne, .ti, .tr, .po, .op (odd page)

But roff did NOT have conditionals, traps, special characters,
environments, or arbitrary motion control. Crucially (and ironically,
because I was Mr. Macro), it did not have anything like macros,
strings and diversions until after Joe pioneered them in nroff.

So there was a gaping disparity: nroff was Turing complete, roff
wasn't. Roff merely added features to runoff; nroff leapt into a
different universe.

-----------------------

The features listed above are in the January 1971 manual for BCPL
roff, which is probably the anonymous reference cited in the November
1971 v1 manual. The v1 manual lists Osanna, Ken and Dennis as authors
of the Unix implementation. I believe Ossanna is named because he
added line-numbering--and maybe more--to entice the patent department
to switch to roff.

BCPL roff allowed all four arithmetic operators in contexts like .ls
*3. Only + and - were allowed in nroff. Eventually both BCPL roff and
nroff got number registers (defined by different commands); I don't
recall which came first. BCPL roff also got a weak macro facility,
definitely after nroff.

Doug

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 45+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2022-01-13 20:01 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 45+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2022-01-12  2:49 [TUHS] TeX and groff (was: roff(7)) Jon Steinhart
2022-01-12 10:38 ` Ralph Corderoy
2022-01-12 17:53   ` Jon Steinhart
2022-01-12 18:27     ` G. Branden Robinson
2022-01-12 19:02       ` John Cowan
  -- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2022-01-13 17:31 Douglas McIlroy
2022-01-11 13:37 Nelson H. F. Beebe
2022-01-10 21:12 Bakul Shah
2022-01-10 21:06 Jon Steinhart
2022-01-11 11:06 ` Ralph Corderoy
2022-01-11 14:52   ` John Cowan
2021-12-31 15:47 [TUHS] roff(7) Douglas McIlroy
2021-12-31 23:07 ` George Michaelson
2021-12-31 23:40   ` Larry McVoy
2022-01-01  0:56     ` [TUHS] TeX and groff (was: roff(7)) Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2022-01-01  3:15       ` Larry McVoy
2022-01-10 19:00         ` Blake McBride
2022-01-10 20:21           ` Jon Forrest
2022-01-11 22:48             ` Blake McBride
2022-01-11 23:18               ` Larry McVoy
2022-01-12  1:19                 ` Dave Horsfall
2022-01-12  1:46                 ` Blake McBride
2022-01-12  2:12                 ` Bakul Shah
2022-01-12 15:49                   ` Larry McVoy
2022-01-12 16:22                     ` Adam Thornton
2022-01-12  0:06               ` Jon Steinhart
2022-01-12  1:48                 ` Blake McBride
2022-01-12  0:29               ` Nemo Nusquam
2022-01-12  1:53                 ` Blake McBride
     [not found]               ` <E3CC4B8A-4E88-4339-A4D3-4ED26BA80620@gmail.com>
2022-01-12  0:44                 ` Jon Forrest
2022-01-12  2:00                   ` Blake McBride
2022-01-12  2:10                     ` David Arnold
2022-01-12  2:26                       ` Adam Thornton
2022-01-12 19:54                     ` John Cowan
2022-01-13 10:13                       ` Thomas Paulsen
2022-01-13 20:00                         ` John Cowan
2022-01-10 20:33           ` Larry McVoy
2022-01-10 20:37             ` Richard Salz
2022-01-10 21:04               ` Dan Cross
2022-01-10 21:48                 ` Nemo Nusquam
2022-01-11  2:25                 ` Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM)
2022-01-11  2:47                   ` Larry McVoy
2022-01-12  1:19             ` Mary Ann Horton
2022-01-12  2:03               ` Blake McBride
2022-01-12  2:10               ` Bakul Shah
2022-01-12  3:44                 ` Dan Cross
2022-01-12 16:48               ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2022-01-10 20:46           ` Steffen Nurpmeso

This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).