[TUHS] Re: Documenting a set of functions with -man

[arnold@skeeve.com]

Hi.

> G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > So maybe they had access to a CAT-8 after all, and used a whopping 5
> > different font plates.  Or they used a CAT-4 and had to compose many
> > pages in two passes.  That would have been mightily tedious.

Mychaela Falconia <falcon@freecalypso.org> wrote:

> Are you certain that the bold in that book is real B font and not .bd
> construct?  I am not sure about the full K&R book, but the C Reference
> Manual doc in vol 2 seems to have been troff'ed with .bd for bold
> (while keepting R, I, S and adding CW), ditto for the UNIX Programming
> doc in the same volume that similarly uses CW for program listings.

The use of .bd is indeed the case. I asked. :-)
From BWK, forwarded by permission.

> Date: Fri, 28 Jun 2024 04:02:06 -0400 (EDT)
> From: Brian Kernighan <bwk@cs.princeton.edu>
> To: Aharon Robbins <arnold@skeeve.com>
> Subject: Re: can you comment
>
> I can't find the macros we used, though I have the text itself.
> I know that there were only 4 font positions, period.  One of
> those definitely was S, the special font.  I think that we
> mounted the CW font in position 3 for programs, and we used
> the .bd command to simulate bold by overstriking with a small
> offset.  Joe Ossanna had added that to troff as a favor not
> long before he died.
>
> The source for the second edition of Programming Style, which
> dates from about the same time, is consistent with this.
>
> On Fri, 28 Jun 2024, Aharon Robbins wrote:
>
> > https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2024-June/030267.html
> >
> > Question has arisen as to how you got more than 4 font families
> > when setting K&R-1.
> >
> > Arnold