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

[Mychaela Falconia <falcon@freecalypso.org>]

Hi again John,

> I only meant "professional" insofar as aptitude with graphics is concerned.
> I won't accept money; I'm offering my labour out of love for typography,
> computer history and its preservation, and of course, the technology that
> got Unix the funding it needed to revolutionise computing. In any case,
> there's no actual "design" work involved: it's literally just tracing
> existing shapes to recreate an existing design. I do stuff like this
> <https://github.com/file-icons/icons#why-request-an-icon-cant-i-submit-a-pr>
> for *fun*, for crying out loud.

Sounds great!  If you are indeed serious about trying to recreate the
ancient C/A/T character set in PostScript fonts (or some other font
format that can be converted into a form that can be downloaded into a
genuine PostScript printer), I'll try to find some time to produce the
following:

1) A set of C/A/T binary files corresponding to that CSTR #54 manual,
as well as BWK's troff tutorial which usually follows right after in
book compilations.  This step is simply a matter of running the original
troff executable (with -t option) on the original source files for
these docs - but since I actually run an OS that still includes that
original version of troff and you said you don't, it would probably be
easier for me to produce and publish these files.

2) A converter tool from C/A/T binary codes to PostScript, using
whatever fonts you give it.  I'll test it initially using the set of
fonts which I developed for my 4.3BSD-Quasijarus pstroff - all
characters will be there, all positioning will come from original
troff, but it won't look pretty because most PS native font characters
don't match those of C/A/T.  Then as you progress with your font
drawing project, you should be able to substitute your fonts instead
of mine, and see how the output improves.

> Nice! The more material I have, the merrier. As for the scan that Branden
> and I were referring to, I've uploaded a copy to Dropbox

Using pdfimages utility with -list option, I compared the image format
and resolution in various scans I described in my previous mail, plus
this new one you just shared, and concluded that the best quality is
contained in these two:

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/7th_Edition/UNIX_Programmers_Manual_Seventh_Edition_January_1979_Volume_2A_SRI_Reprint_June_1980.pdf

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/7th_Edition/VA-004A_UNIX_Programmers_Manual_Edition_Seven_Volume_2A_197901.pdf

Here are extracted PNG images of just the relevant page from both PDFs:

https://www.freecalypso.org/members/falcon/troff/cstr54-fontpage-sri.png
https://www.freecalypso.org/members/falcon/troff/cstr54-fontpage-ucb.png

Each PNG is a lossless extract from the corresponding PDF, made with
pdfimages utility.  Each image is described as being 600x600 DPI in
PDF metadata, and the print is said to be in 12 point - numbers for
converting from pixels to .001m units in font reconstruction...

M~