Re: [TUHS] Paper discussing Unix boot process?

[Fabio Scotoni <fabio@esse.ch>]

On 4/11/19 1:19 AM, Bakul Shah wrote:
> On Apr 10, 2019, at 3:24 PM, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
>>
>> [...] is the Lions book including PS and PDF and in the original troff thankfully.
> 
> Sorry to disappoint you but it's the same LaTeX source.
> 
>> [Why someone would convert it to tex is a little beyond me].
> 
> 
> May be someone will be inspired enough to convert this to troff?
> 
> 

Not to be too negative, but converting it to troff would be somewhat of
an effort; however, the gains for that seem to be comparatively small.
It would be a change from one language to another, neither of which are
a 1:1 copy of the original.
Even if you had the original troff sources of the book,
groff, heirloom-troff and Plan9 ditroff probably all have line breaking
and character positioning algorithms that don't match the original troff
at the time.

If someone were to undertake this troff endeavor, aiming for a perfect
recreation would be the most beneficial (yet also most difficult) thing
to do.
I've never seen the original commentary, but I'll assume that it used a
homebrewed set of macros.
Thus, the first step would be to reverse engineer the troff macros used
to typeset the book.
Then the TeX sources would need to be converted to those troff macros;
this can possibly be automated entirely.
Then the matching version of troff would need to be used to typeset it
(likely via apout and V6 or V7 troff).
Finally, the C/A/T typesetter output would need to be converted to
PostScript or PDF (either Adobe's psroff or Chris Lewis's psroff from
comp.unix.sources can likely help with that; I got Lewis's psroff to
work a while ago, but it's pretty brittle).