From: Mary Ann Horton <mah@mhorton.net>
To: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [TUHS] troff was not so widely usable
Date: Wed, 10 Feb 2021 18:30:31 -0800 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <4be538bd-a4ee-4287-4d61-9cc6e18c061b@mhorton.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAC20D2N=e+jBCvkqxShZ6Yw2E-RvgAj+kJi9YTr4s6Qiv_4_aw@mail.gmail.com>
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We had vtroff at Berkeley around 1980, on the big Versatec wet plotter,
4 pages wide. We got really good at cutting up the pages on the output.
It used the Hershey font. It was horrible. Mangled somehow, lots of
parts of glyphs missing. I called it the "Horse Shit" font.
I took it as my mission to clean it up. I wrote "fed" to edit it, dot by
dot, on the graphical HP 2648 terminal at Berkeley. I got all the fonts
reasonably cleaned up, but it was laborious.
I still hated Hershey. It was my dream to get real C/A/T output at the
largest 36 point size, and scan it in to create a decent set of Times
fonts. I finally got the C/A/T output years later at Bell Labs, but
there were no scanners available to me at the time. Then True Type came
along and it was moot.
I did stumble onto one nice rendition of Times Roman in one point size,
from Stanford, I think. I used it to write banner(6).
On 2/10/21 5:53 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
> Ron. That’s awesome. Ferrin used the Same set of Hersey Font that the
> XGP used. He got them from Stanford as I recall but they were
> publically (aka open source)
>
> On Wed, Feb 10, 2021 at 7:28 PM Ron Natalie <ron@ronnatalie.com
> <mailto:ron@ronnatalie.com>> wrote:
>
> We used nroff quite a bit with both the Model37 teletype (for
> which it
> wsa designed, ours even had the greek box on it) and with output
> filters
> for the lineprinter and the Diablos.
>
> Later on we drove troff into cat emulators that used Versatec
> printers.
> I don’t knwo wher Berkely’s vcat got their fonts, but the JHU
> verset
> had an amusing history on that.
>
> George Toth went down to the NRL which had a real CAT and printed out
> the fonts in large point size on film. In the basement of the
> biophysics bulding was a scanning transmission electron microscope
> which
> used a PDP-11/20 as its controller and an older (512x512 or so)
> framebuffer. George took the scanning wires off the microsope nad
> hooked them up to the X and Y of a tektronics oscilliscope. Then he
> put a photomutlipler tube in a scope camera housing and hoked the
> sense
> wire from the microscope to that.
>
> He now had the worlds most expensive flying spot scanner. He’d tape
> one letter at a time to the scope and then bring up the microscope
> sofware (DOS/BATCH I think) and tell it to run the microscope.
> Then
> without powering down the memory in the framebuffer, he’d boot up
> miniunix and copy the stuff from the framebuffer to an RX05 pack.
> After months of laboriously scanning he was able to write the CAT
> emulator.
>
> I had gone to work for Martin Marietta wirking on a classified
> project
> so I wrote hacks to the -mm macro package to handle security markings
> (automatically putting the highest on each page on thte top and
> bottom).
> Later when ditroff became available I continued to use it with
> various laserprinters. I even wrote macropackages to emulate IBM’s
> doc style when we were contracting with them.
>
> This was all to the chagrin of my boss who wanted us to switch to
> Framemaker.
>
>
>
> --
> Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2021-02-11 2:31 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 65+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2020-11-30 3:10 [TUHS] The UNIX Command Language (1976) Joachim via TUHS
2020-11-30 8:30 ` Thomas Paulsen
2020-11-30 13:36 ` Brantley Coile
2020-11-30 15:12 ` Tom Ivar Helbekkmo via TUHS
2020-11-30 15:52 ` Clem Cole
2020-11-30 16:25 ` Dan Cross
2020-11-30 16:38 ` Warner Losh
2020-11-30 16:41 ` Dan Cross
2020-11-30 16:37 ` Larry McVoy
2020-11-30 16:54 ` Clem Cole
2020-11-30 18:13 ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2020-11-30 18:25 ` John Cowan
2020-11-30 18:37 ` Clem Cole
2020-11-30 20:11 ` arnold
2020-11-30 21:49 ` Will Senn
2020-12-01 2:55 ` Jon Steinhart
2020-11-30 18:46 ` Nemo Nusquam
2021-02-10 20:48 ` [TUHS] troff was not so widely usable (was: The UNIX Command Language (1976)) Greg A. Woods
2021-02-10 21:44 ` Larry McVoy
2021-02-10 22:05 ` Clem Cole
2021-02-11 21:58 ` Greg A. Woods
2021-02-12 5:22 ` George Michaelson
2021-02-12 22:13 ` Dave Horsfall
2021-02-12 22:18 ` Ron Natalie
2021-02-10 22:36 ` Jon Steinhart
2021-02-10 23:05 ` George Michaelson
2021-02-11 0:27 ` Ron Natalie
2021-02-11 0:36 ` Larry McVoy
2021-02-11 1:53 ` Clem Cole
2021-02-11 1:59 ` Richard Salz
2021-02-11 2:04 ` George Michaelson
2021-02-11 2:44 ` Richard Salz
2021-02-11 3:02 ` Steve Nickolas
2021-02-11 4:07 ` Toby Thain
2021-02-11 16:55 ` Ron Natalie
2021-02-11 20:27 ` John Cowan
2021-02-11 2:30 ` Mary Ann Horton [this message]
2021-02-11 2:52 ` [TUHS] troff was not so widely usable Larry McVoy
2021-02-11 6:42 ` Andrew Hume
2021-02-11 7:12 ` Rob Pike
2021-02-11 13:06 ` John Gilmore
2021-02-11 17:34 ` Jon Forrest
2021-02-11 18:09 ` John Cowan
2021-02-11 18:43 ` Rich Morin
2020-12-01 3:59 ` [TUHS] The UNIX Command Language (1976) jason-tuhs
2020-12-01 4:03 ` Jon Steinhart
2020-12-01 9:27 ` Steve Nickolas
2020-12-01 15:09 ` Jim Capp
2020-12-01 15:35 ` Toby Thain
2020-12-01 15:38 ` arnold
2020-12-01 16:24 ` Warner Losh
2020-12-01 16:39 ` arnold
2020-12-01 20:13 ` Rob Pike
2020-12-02 7:08 ` arnold
2020-12-02 7:29 ` Rob Pike
2020-12-01 20:20 ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2020-12-01 20:39 ` Bakul Shah
2020-12-01 21:24 ` Dan Cross
2020-12-01 23:44 ` John Cowan
2020-12-12 19:50 ` scj
2020-12-01 16:47 ` Larry McVoy
2020-12-01 20:13 ` Dave Horsfall
2020-12-01 20:49 ` John Cowan
2020-12-01 16:04 ` Tyler Adams
2021-02-11 12:52 [TUHS] troff was not so widely usable Nelson H. F. Beebe
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