[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Mychaela Falconia <falcon@freecalypso.org>]

G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:

> Right.  Nowadays we call these (and other measurements besides width)
> the "font metrics".

Not just "nowadays": font metrics has always been the standard term,
including original troff days.  But I specifically said "spacing widths"
because it is the _only_ metric that matters for the purpose of pleasing
otroff and keeping all line and page breaks where they were originally.

All other metrics matter not in the "pleasing otroff" category, but in
the category of "visual beauty" or "recreating exact appearance", which
would be next-level-up from simply satisfying otroff.

> You will quickly observe that the C/A/T's "Special Mathematical Font",
> bearing the pellucid name "S" in the Ossanna/Thompson naming convention
> popular at Bell Labs, renders all its lowercase Greek letters in italic
> form.  PostScript's Symbol font does not.

Yes, this difference exists.  However, let me point out that *both*
official troff-to-PS toolchains that existed in traditional UNIX world
(Adobe TranScript is one and Bell Labs DWB is the other) took the path
of accepting non-slanted Greek letters as-is from Symbol.  Seeing that
Bell Labs themselves deemed this change as acceptable tells me that
the slanted nature of lowercase Greek letters in original typesetter
fonts (C/A/T, APS-5) was not considered an absolutely essential feature
of these characters that MUST be preserved in every new troff
implementation.

> "Slanted symbol", a.k.a. "SS", is a supplemental face in groff...of old
> provenance--it goes back to groff 1.06 (September 1992) at least.

OK, fair enough: your lineage made a different choice in this regard.
But seeing that both Adobe TranScript and Bell Labs' own later troff
took the same approach as I took in my troff (using Symbol as-is), I
don't feel guilty about not doing the same SS manipulation you do in
groff.

There is also a historical/timeline factor for me: A.D. 2010 was the
first time I laid my eyes on the output of a traditional pre-PostScript
troff typesetter (that was when I scored a physical copy of 4.3BSD
books), and by that point I had been using my own troff for 6 y since
2004.  Yes, I wrote it blindly at first: because of my younger age, I
didn't get to live through the era of traditional typesetters, I
totally missed it, but I needed a working troff under my then-production
OS (4.3BSD) - so what was I supposed to do?...

M~