[TUHS] Re: Fwd: Trove of CSTR's

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

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At 2024-09-28T19:20:07-0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
> That CSTR number 1 is nicely formatted, is that troff?

troff didn't exist yet in 1971.

That is proper typesetting, though.  I don't know enough to say if it's
phototypeset or hot lead (can the naked eye reliably tell, if both
techniques are of high quality?).  We could take the question to the
real typographers on the groff list.

roff(7):
     Third Edition Unix also brought the pipe(2) system call, the
     explosive growth of a componentized system based around it, and a
     “filter model” that remains perceptible today.  Equally
     importantly, the Bell Labs site in Murray Hill acquired a Graphic
     Systems C/A/T phototypesetter, and with it came the necessity of
     expanding the capabilities of a roff system to cope with a variety
     of proportionally spaced typefaces at multiple sizes.  Ossanna
     wrote a parallel implementation of nroff for the C/A/T, dubbing it
     troff (for “typesetter roff”).  Unfortunately, surviving
     documentation does not illustrate what requests were implemented at
     this time for C/A/T support; the troff(1) man page in Fourth
     Edition Unix (November 1973) does not feature a request list,
     unlike nroff(1).  Apart from typesetter‐driven features, Unix
     Version 4 roffs added string definitions (.ds); made the escape
     character configurable (.ec); and enabled the user to write
     diagnostics to the standard error stream (.tm).  Around 1974,
     empowered with multiple type sizes, italics, and a symbol font
     specially commissioned by Bell Labs from Graphic Systems, Kernighan
     and Lorinda Cherry implemented eqn for typesetting mathematics.  In
     the same year, for Fifth Edition Unix, Ossanna combined and
     reimplemented the two roffs in C, using that language’s
     preprocessor to generate both from a single source tree.

Regards,
Branden

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