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 > 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