[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual?

["G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com>]

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At 2024-01-05T19:02:48-0800, Mychaela Falconia wrote:
> * My hypothesis is that Ossanna's original troff document was troffed
> some time around the date of its authorship (1976-10-11), and at that
> time the font set on Bell Labs' Graphic Systems typesetter had a
> hollow square for \(sq in all 3 fonts.  At some point between
> 1976-10-11 and 1978-08-04 (authorship date of bwk's troff tutorial
> document), the font set on the very same Graphic Systems typesetter
> was updated to a newer version that had \(sq as a filled square in
> Times Bold font - and bwk's doc specifically shows this character in
> regular and bold, when all others were shown only in regular.
> Furthermore, the design of /usr/pub/eqnchar was made at the time of
> \fB\(sq\fP being a filled square, as this construct is used for the
> "blot" made-up character.

My belief, based on the evidence I have from these publications
colophons reporting which phototypesetter was used, is that the \(sq
special character was not filled in Graphic Systems C/A/T fonts used by
Bell Labs, but _was_ filled in the bold face by the Autologic APS-5.

I have documented this understanding in the groff_char(7) man page, so
if it is incorrect, for could be made more precise, I would appreciate
finding out.

Also, my copies of these books are overseas, but I seem to remember that
the Holt/Reinhart/Winston (HRW) 1983 reprint of the Seventh Edition
Programmer's Manual also featured an additional article on bibliography
preparation.  (The original white paper on "refer" was pretty rough
going for a normal user, and primarily concerned with hash map
implementation performance.  Bill Tuthill's paper in BSD is much more
tractable.)

> What was the physical form of this book?  Was it a "perfect bound"
> book?

The HRW copies I have are perfect bound.  But I can't remember if they
were 3-hole punched as well.

Where did you discover the identity and date of the 1998 retypeset of
the V7 Volume 2 manual?  I have wondered about this for years.  In part
to complain, because while it is a _fairly_ faithful reproduction of the
original, it is not perfect, and this has led to some arguments on the
groff mailing list with people who impute excessive authority to it.

(I guess they couldn't see the little hollow gray boxes where the
PostScript renderer had no defined character, if we're talking about the
same document.)

Regards,
Branden

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