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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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  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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