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Branden Robinson" To: Jaap Akkerhuis Message-ID: <20241006151133.fbj6pmujpvuuo47d@illithid> References: <20241005001433.7hukoga5bbbb3ygl@illithid> <20241005222207.eerdrgtsttmx42kb@illithid> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/signed; micalg=pgp-sha256; protocol="application/pgp-signature"; boundary="ln5a4l6cspqdg6tw" Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: Message-ID-Hash: LMO3ZOOYVGEJ66XABOIBA4EHONDUDWSW X-Message-ID-Hash: LMO3ZOOYVGEJ66XABOIBA4EHONDUDWSW X-MailFrom: g.branden.robinson@gmail.com X-Mailman-Rule-Misses: dmarc-mitigation; no-senders; approved; emergency; loop; banned-address; member-moderation; header-match-tuhs.tuhs.org-0; nonmember-moderation; administrivia; implicit-dest; max-recipients; max-size; news-moderation; no-subject; digests; suspicious-header CC: "Jacobson, Doug W [E CPE]" , "tuhs@tuhs.org" , groff@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 3.3.6b1 Precedence: list Subject: [TUHS] Re: Old troff files (1988-2007) List-Id: The Unix Heritage Society mailing list Archived-At: List-Archive: List-Help: List-Owner: List-Post: List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: --ln5a4l6cspqdg6tw Content-Type: text/plain; protected-headers=v1; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Subject: Re: [TUHS] Old troff files (1988-2007) MIME-Version: 1.0 Hi Jaap, At 2024-10-06T14:54:59+0200, Jaap Akkerhuis wrote: > > On 6 Oct 2024, at 00:22, G. Branden Robinson > > wrote: > >=20 > > Unix nroff got frozen in amber in 1978 with respect to terminal > > support, and continues to live in a world where the termcap and > > terminfo libraries were never written. >=20 > Nroff did actually read in the output description from, if I remember > correctly, /usr/lib/termtab/xxx with the argument -Txxx. Yes. When Kernighan refactored V7 troff/nroff for device-independence, he implemented a similar scheme for each. While for troff, this resulted in device and font description files, "DESC" and a motley variety of capitalized one-or-two letter names for fonts, for nroff they were termed "driving tables", a terminological choice that concealed how closely they resembled the troff scheme. Compare, for example: https://github.com/n-t-roff/DWB3.3/blob/master/postscript/devopost/DESC https://github.com/n-t-roff/DWB3.3/blob/master/postscript/devopost/R with: https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=3DV10/cmd/troff/tab.37 https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=3DV10/cmd/troff/tab.450 =2E..and the family resemblance seems clear. > these where stripped object files. I have heard tell of a "binary format" for Kernighan troff device and font descriptions but never encountered it. groff never attempted to replicate it and I gather that Plan 9 troff also discarded it. > I have made them for Diable daisy-wheel printers. Some could create > bold characters by overprinting and we once had one with two print > heads, the second head had an italics daisy-wheel mounted. Right. The Diablo features heavily in early '80s Unix documentation. However none of this has much to do, in my opinion, with the _terminal capability databases_ offered by termcap and (later) terminfo. The whole point of these is to _query_ the user's terminal type, not have to be told it with some `-T` option. To my knowledge, no nroff has ever simply looked at "$TERM" and then decided how to format output. Approximately all other Unix software that writes to a terminal behaves that way. nroff didn't, and by God some Unix grognards would have it stay that way.[1][2] Mark Nudelman's less(1) is probably the foremost contributor of inertia here, since man(1) is far and away the leading application of nroff(1), and less(1) the victorious pager program after a long and bloody campaign of attrition. (This isn't a complaint; we could have done worse. most(1) could have won instead.[3]) Lennart Jablonka has contributed a patch to groff to resolve this longevous discrepancy. (It ended up on my slow path for integration because I decided I needed to understand terminfo much better, and that in turn led me to contribute a large volume of man page revisions to ncurses, many of which can be enjoyed(?) in its 6.5 release.[4]) https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?63583 Regards, Branden [1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=3D312935 [2] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/729124/linux-9-commands-send-a= nsi-color-sequences-to-monochrome-terminal [3] https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/ncurses-slang.html [4] https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/announce.html https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/man/ Despite his grognard standpoint with respect to grotty(1)'s default use of SGR escape sequences in output, I would emphasize that Thomas Dickey has been a pleasure to work with. It's difficult to imagine the same being true of Alan Curry. --ln5a4l6cspqdg6tw Content-Type: application/pgp-signature; name="signature.asc" -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iQIzBAABCAAdFiEEh3PWHWjjDgcrENwa0Z6cfXEmbc4FAmcCqJ0ACgkQ0Z6cfXEm bc4Ncg//RzQBxe71MPYNmgTi7JQpNJzs0U5YSiZc7dFLqMXICd8sxujT4sK0FUib W7VAKIyYk4l8M9sMBNElqcp/9zElLdvOEFaEVzrJvTLkOFaHZlY2c0YXe6JVGZQo jtJcu14q2oj6nr1Xykw0D4nCq2R20Eicn/C8lR8PFU6dbFXygjCs3pI6AzPOwD4t GYHb87JMuRn4pSkYVTnco4Zz9PaBISSQBgjzvu5n099kDvHyxjgyEDKJwCcrnV9z 1nb+PxFlyDWcmL8YmA3g+9HIFxoVCrz55cnC2oT+9YhkGsPQd0JBuyHs65/x0QPU ZcwRhBrRKqJDgBpfrxdtz059X0QCY37/fpSRujnZwdRYpPj8+Y489i3obDvPb33e Vsu+2ldWOnilk+8uu6vzerw1j2kEI6ExFZ2F8RRBrxU0+oRBogjRKoAklboOeL1M tf7I5w74R+AvkVxncf5Oj8DUP5IsOfawayQ8ehZmT6ZpRrQL2eniqeIOT7Qd1FaR neY/zMdUlvrtV9GAiPOB2daQd4MT6UxqHSvi14BrFUVgRW7xBB07ueOzvFRQv6GD vV+HyqRMvufpdokNwtkoV4fNhR2hP/RcNXQmUxunAw4j68LuqPS85MPMEcpp8Bt6 wQNtWxpSngIwks9eIlp7HaLYxM/r5jwLRhmoRymUo7fnDuFc9yQ= =k9xB -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --ln5a4l6cspqdg6tw--