Re: [TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

Re: [TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

[Douglas McIlroy]

> Later Brian's work was updated after V7 and included some new tools, and became known as Writer's Workbench, which eventually was entered in the 'toolchest.'

WWB wouldn't exist if text had not routinely existed in
machine-readable form, thanks to word-processing. But the impetus for
WWB came from "style", not from troff.

Style was a spinoff of Lorinda Cherry's "parts", which assigned parts
of speech to the words of a document. Style provided a statistical
profile of the text: measures such as average word length: frequency
of passives, adjectives and compound sentences, reading level, etc.
WWB in turn offered writing advice based on such profiles.

Style was stimulated by Bill Vesterman, a professor of English at
Rutgers, who brought the idea to me. I introduced him to Lorinda, who
had it running in a couple of weeks. Then Nina McDonald at USG
conceived and packaged WWB as a distinct product, not just a
collection of entries in man 1.

Wikipedia reports a surmise that WWB sank out of sight because it was
not a standard part of Unix distributions.

Doug

Re: [TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

[Dan Cross]

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On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 3:55 AM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:

> [snip]
> Perhaps Doug can set the history straight on troff. Here is my
> understanding,
> corrections (from Doug) welcome:
>
> - Ossanna wrote the original nroff in assembly language
> - He rewrote it in C when the C/A/T was acquired
>   At that time nroff/troff were built from mostly the same sources (as
>   can be seen in the archives).
>

I have some questions about the earlier history.

As I understand it, in the beginning there was RUNOFF, which I believe
originated on CTSS? The CTSS sources contain a RUNOFF program that's made
up of ~1100 lines of MAD and ~1300 lines of assembler. There is certainly a
RUNOFF in Multics, written in BCPL (there's a small "outer module
transfer vector" program in ALM). This is where it gets muddy for me; I
understand this was roughly ported to unix as `roff` by Ken and that at
this point, formatting was fairly primitive: suitable for hardcopy
terminals and line printers, and could do things like center lines and so
forth, but nothing fancy (https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/reader.pdf).
Ossanna then took over and greatly expanded the capabilities of `roff`,
adding macros and traps and making it Turing-complete; this was `nroff`,
which grew to become `troff` once the C/A/T typesetter was acquired.

Section 4.1 ("Text Processing") of Doug's "Research Unix Reader" above
includes some tantalizing tidbits, particularly this, regarding `troff`:
"It blew the manufacturer’s
mind, and touched off a flurry of homemade documents in flamboyant
layouts—good enough, however, to fool referees into suspecting that the
manuscripts had been published before." Ooo, that last bit sounds like a
good story! Doug, can you tell us more?

        - Dan C.

PS: Something came up on the Multics mailing list recently that may be of
local interest. Someone was looking for a set of troff macros used
internally by Honeywell for the preparation of technical documentation and
memoranda and it was asked whether this had been done on Multics?
Apparently, `troff` never made it back to its ancestor's home, even though
at some point circa the SVR2 era a C compiler was ported and it would have
been, perhaps, possible. The answer to the original question was that that
documentation had been prepared on a Unix machine of some kind; the macros
seem lost to time.

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Re: [TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

[Clem Cole]

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On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 10:51 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 01:48:58AM -0700, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> > CSSC is the GNU project's reimplimentation of SCCS, to which, I believe,
> > Larry contributed.
>
> Only in some very minor ways, the author and I chatted and I cleared up
> some of his thinking.  With all due respect to him, I wasn't impressed
> with the source base, it was C++ (I think) and slow (I know).
>
And IIRC, no man pages either ;-)

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Re: [TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

[Clem Cole]

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Yes -- thank you.  Dyslexia-r-me

On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 3:49 AM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:

> Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
>
> > Beyond base duplication, numerous companies published parts of them and
> in
> > particular parts if not all of the roff manual.  For instance, a firm in
> > Seattle called CSSC published a number of reference guides and use guides
> > based on them
>
> You mean "SSC" - Specialized Systems Consultants. I did work for them
> in the 90s and they started Linux Journal, for which I wrote a few articles
> early on.  The main guy there, Phil Hughes, was an interesting person.
> After getting rich from LJ he dropped out and moved to Central or South
> America.
>
> CSSC is the GNU project's reimplimentation of SCCS, to which, I believe,
> Larry contributed.
>
> Arnold
>

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Re: [TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

[Larry McVoy]

On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 01:48:58AM -0700, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> CSSC is the GNU project's reimplimentation of SCCS, to which, I believe,
> Larry contributed.

Only in some very minor ways, the author and I chatted and I cleared up
some of his thinking.  With all due respect to him, I wasn't impressed
with the source base, it was C++ (I think) and slow (I know).

Re: [TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

[Clem Cole]

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On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 3:54 AM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:

>
> - Ossanna wrote the original nroff in assembly language
> - He rewrote it in C when the C/A/T was acquired
>   At that time nroff/troff were built from mostly the same sources (as
>   can be seen in the archives).
>
That is also my understanding.

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Re: [TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

[arnold]

Clem,

Once again, you have the timeline wrong on all this. The ditroff work
was started in the summer of 1979, well after V6, Typesetter C and
V7.  Details are available at https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/202/202paper.pdf
and https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/202/summer.reconstructed.pdf.

Perhaps Doug can set the history straight on troff. Here is my understanding,
corrections (from Doug) welcome:

- Ossanna wrote the original nroff in assembly language
- He rewrote it in C when the C/A/T was acquired
  At that time nroff/troff were built from mostly the same sources (as
  can be seen in the archives).

Thanks,

Arnold

Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

> After Joe died and the BTL crew got a new APS5 typesetter, Brian set out to
> rewrite the code base to support any typesetting by using traditional
> compiler technology of converting the input to an ASCII representation that
> is walked by a seperate program that generates the device specific output.
> In fact it was this work (original done on V6) that forced Dennis (and I
> assume Steve Johnson) to update the C language a bit - which is what is
> described in K&R1.  Brian's code and a version of DMR's updated C compiler
> was released independently as a package - hence the term 'typesetter C.'
>  This compiler and the new document system took a seperate license.   I had
> it at both CMU in the 70s and Tektronix -- I think Steve Glaser had it at
> Rice also - again ask someone else for other sites, including some of the
> early European ones.
>
> Later Brian's work was updated after V7 and included some new tools, and
> became known as Writer's Workbench, which eventually was entered in the
> 'toolchest.'
>
> At the time of the first release Brian published a paper / TR that
> describes the new version of troff (a.ka. ditroff), including some level of
> documentation for the intermediate language.  That was published and would
> have been officially available to James.

Re: [TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

[arnold]

Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

> Beyond base duplication, numerous companies published parts of them and in
> particular parts if not all of the roff manual.  For instance, a firm in
> Seattle called CSSC published a number of reference guides and use guides
> based on them

You mean "SSC" - Specialized Systems Consultants. I did work for them
in the 90s and they started Linux Journal, for which I wrote a few articles
early on.  The main guy there, Phil Hughes, was an interesting person.
After getting rich from LJ he dropped out and moved to Central or South
America.

CSSC is the GNU project's reimplimentation of SCCS, to which, I believe,
Larry contributed.

Arnold

Re: [TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

[Nemo Nusquam]

On 2022-01-10 20:59, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote (in part):
> As long as man pages are formatted with ?roff, I don't see it going
> away.  I don't suppose many people use troff any more, but there are
> enough of us, and as long as man pages stay the way they are, I don't
> think we're in any danger.

Macos ships with *roff.

N.

Re: [TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

[Warner Losh]

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On Tue, Jan 11, 2022 at 4:57 PM Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, Jan 11, 2022 at 1:08 PM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
>
>> The AT&T case basically said that once the implementations was released,
>> AT&T could no longer call anything a trade secret, although they *do the
>> own the IP and copyright*
>>
>
> Not entirely true. There was a preliminary ruling that said that 32V might
> have lost its copyright protections because it was distributed outside of
> AT&T without proper copyright notices, as required by the pre-1980
> copyright law. This detail was what caused AT&T to settle before it could
> become finalized (the preliminary ruling said there was a substantial
> likelihood that this would be the outcome, to be pedantic). To the extent
> that AT&T had complied with copyright laws requirements, they would retain
> their copyrights though.
>

See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc._v._Berkeley_Software_Design,_Inc.
for a summary (see Pretrial section) and
http://sco.tuxrocks.com/Docs/USL/Doc-92.html for the ruling itself that
discusses the details).

"Consequently, I find that Plaintiff has failed to demonstrate a likelihood
that it can successfully defend its copyright in 32V. Plaintiff's claims of
copyright violations are not a basis for injunctive relief."

being the appropriate quote. Plantif == USL.

Warner

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Re: [TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

[Warner Losh]

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On Tue, Jan 11, 2022 at 1:08 PM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

> The AT&T case basically said that once the implementations was released,
> AT&T could no longer call anything a trade secret, although they *do the
> own the IP and copyright*
>

Not entirely true. There was a preliminary ruling that said that 32V might
have lost its copyright protections because it was distributed outside of
AT&T without proper copyright notices, as required by the pre-1980
copyright law. This detail was what caused AT&T to settle before it could
become finalized (the preliminary ruling said there was a substantial
likelihood that this would be the outcome, to be pedantic). To the extent
that AT&T had complied with copyright laws requirements, they would retain
their copyrights though.

Warner

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Re: [TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

[Jon Steinhart]

Larry McVoy writes:
> He editted the roff input directly.  I gave him a copy of BitKeeper 
> and he used that to check in.  Comments were check in comments.

Yeah, I get this.  But I was dealing with a publisher whose staff was
trained differently and weren't going to learn roff just for me.  They
(No Starch Press) do a lot of books per year, and it didn't make sense
for them to retrain just for me.  And, it wasn't just one editor; there
were many passes with many different editors, some of whom were contract
editors that Bill wasn't going to pay to learn new stuff.

Bottom line is that I think that it would be awesome to have a WYSIWYG
front end to the roff tools.  Clearly not impossible as even Word and
such as some sort of back end format which was only made possible by
calling it markup instead of macros :-)

Re: [TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

[Larry McVoy]

On Tue, Jan 11, 2022 at 12:41:37PM -0800, Jon Steinhart wrote:
> Larry McVoy writes:
> > I wrote the GUIs for BitKeeper, I could absolutely give you exactly 
> > what you want.  Really, what you are describing is our code review
> > system which could done done completely in a web browser but if you
> > needed to hack on things, you cloned it and hacked on it and pushed.
> 
> You were looking for a retirement project if I remember correctly.
> While it's probably out of scope for this mailing list, I would be
> interested in how you would handle things like an editor proposing
> a change that would involve not just word changes, but formatting.
> A non-roffer would need to have some way to show those changes and
> to have them pushed back into the appropriate requests and reformatted.

I've done this.  We wrote our own contract with the help a great lawyer
at Fenwick and West.  I showed him how one document was producing around
8 different licenses, from your basic nobody version all the way up to
Intel or HP or whoever master license agreements.  Once he saw how you
could do that, he said "this is so much better than maintaining 8 
different, but mostly the same, documents".  Exactly.

He editted the roff input directly.  I gave him a copy of BitKeeper 
and he used that to check in.  Comments were check in comments.

Re: [TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

[Jon Steinhart]

Larry McVoy writes:
> I wrote the GUIs for BitKeeper, I could absolutely give you exactly 
> what you want.  Really, what you are describing is our code review
> system which could done done completely in a web browser but if you
> needed to hack on things, you cloned it and hacked on it and pushed.

You were looking for a retirement project if I remember correctly.
While it's probably out of scope for this mailing list, I would be
interested in how you would handle things like an editor proposing
a change that would involve not just word changes, but formatting.
A non-roffer would need to have some way to show those changes and
to have them pushed back into the appropriate requests and reformatted.

Re: [TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

[Larry McVoy]

On Tue, Jan 11, 2022 at 12:26:12PM -0800, Jon Steinhart wrote:
> Larry McVoy writes:
> > On Tue, Jan 11, 2022 at 12:15:43PM -0800, Jon Steinhart wrote:
> > > The big thing missing from *roff from a publishing point of view is
> > > a good way to make comments and respond to them.  Kind of a must-have
> > > when working with human (not text) editors.
> >
> > Source code control for the win.
> 
> Well, you're correct, but not practical with human editors.  I'm not
> talking about revision history, I'm talking about the ability to easily
> highlight a portion of text and comment "did you mean foo?" and so on.
> That part of the production process feedback loop is missing.  Of course,
> with *roff one could mostly produce one's own stuff without needing human
> editors and a production staff.

I wrote the GUIs for BitKeeper, I could absolutely give you exactly 
what you want.  Really, what you are describing is our code review
system which could done done completely in a web browser but if you
needed to hack on things, you cloned it and hacked on it and pushed.

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

Re: [TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

[Jon Steinhart]

Larry McVoy writes:
> On Tue, Jan 11, 2022 at 12:15:43PM -0800, Jon Steinhart wrote:
> > The big thing missing from *roff from a publishing point of view is
> > a good way to make comments and respond to them.  Kind of a must-have
> > when working with human (not text) editors.
>
> Source code control for the win.

Well, you're correct, but not practical with human editors.  I'm not
talking about revision history, I'm talking about the ability to easily
highlight a portion of text and comment "did you mean foo?" and so on.
That part of the production process feedback loop is missing.  Of course,
with *roff one could mostly produce one's own stuff without needing human
editors and a production staff.

Re: [TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

[Larry McVoy]

On Tue, Jan 11, 2022 at 12:15:43PM -0800, Jon Steinhart wrote:
> The big thing missing from *roff from a publishing point of view is
> a good way to make comments and respond to them.  Kind of a must-have
> when working with human (not text) editors.

Source code control for the win.

Re: [TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

[Jon Steinhart]

arnold@skeeve.com writes:
> The DocBook conversion make it easy for them to generate HTML so
> that books could be put on CD and browsed with a web browser.
> I believe that was the main motivation.

Having been through this sort of stuff fairly recently, I wrote a
short script that converted my troff macros into OpenOffice XML
format because my publisher wanted Word.  As I think I mentioned
earlier, I also had a script that converted pic into SVG so that
it could be included in Word docs.  There were two difficulties.
First, while I could have SVG pics, I had to insert them into the
doc manually, couldn't figure how to do that in the XML.  Second
was that I ended up sending PDFs of the tables to one of the layout
people as I couldn't come up with a decent way to convert those.
An interesting aspect of this is that I grew up on the simple layout
that was easy to do in tbl which is hard to do in Word as its tables
are overly gaudy.

The big thing missing from *roff from a publishing point of view is
a good way to make comments and respond to them.  Kind of a must-have
when working with human (not text) editors.

Jon

Re: [TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

[Clem Cole]

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On Tue, Jan 11, 2022 at 2:20 PM John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org> wrote:

> I assume you mean s/groff/troff/.  There must have been some public access
> to the documentation like this that allowed James Clark to develop groff in
> the 1987-91 time frame, though.  It's still the *roff shipped with *BSD.
>
No, I mean troff...  troff was written by Joseph Ossanna
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Ossanna> for early version of UNIX.  It
output was for the CAT4 typesetter [which Wang eventually was the owner,
although I believe when BTL bought the typesetter, the C/A/T folk was an
independent company from Wang].

The output is funky binary format.  The docs describing troff can be found
in some of the early distributions [for look in Warrens archives].  IIRC V6
had the nroff sources [
https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V6/usr/source/s7], and v7 has
the nroff/troff source [
https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/troff].

I've forgotten which earlier version had the binary in /bin (maybe v6 but
possibly v5 too) and I'm fairly certain the original source leaked to the
Universities before V7.  I know we had the binary at CMU, before V7, but I
don't remember when we got the source - but I suspect one our OYOC students
brought it.   I'll Let Noah speak for MIT and some one like Mary Ann speak
for UCB before I got there.

After Joe died and the BTL crew got a new APS5 typesetter, Brian set out to
rewrite the code base to support any typesetting by using traditional
compiler technology of converting the input to an ASCII representation that
is walked by a seperate program that generates the device specific output.
In fact it was this work (original done on V6) that forced Dennis (and I
assume Steve Johnson) to update the C language a bit - which is what is
described in K&R1.  Brian's code and a version of DMR's updated C compiler
was released independently as a package - hence the term 'typesetter C.'
 This compiler and the new document system took a seperate license.   I had
it at both CMU in the 70s and Tektronix -- I think Steve Glaser had it at
Rice also - again ask someone else for other sites, including some of the
early European ones.

Later Brian's work was updated after V7 and included some new tools, and
became known as Writer's Workbench, which eventually was entered in the
'toolchest.'

At the time of the first release Brian published a paper / TR that
describes the new version of troff (a.ka. ditroff), including some level of
documentation for the intermediate language.  That was published and would
have been officially available to James.

Clark certainly had access to both the papers as well as binaries.  His
work would eventually be called groff. I personally saw a version of it
before it was taken into the Gnu project, in the early 1980s.  I do not
know if he had access to Brian's actual code under license when he
reimplemented it in C++ creating a new implementation, as UCB did when they
started to rewrite many of the utilities and main OS itself.

The AT&T case basically said that once the implementations was released,
AT&T could no longer call anything a trade secret, although they *do the
own the IP and copyright* [and please not start a GPL/BSD license flame
here -- the horse is so  dead - please go back into the TUHS archives and
read all about it if you are new here].

Larry is correct, that I do not believe that AT&T ever released that IP
directly -- although the sources are certainly available at: The Heirloom
Documentation Tools <https://n-t-roff.github.io/heirloom/doctools.html>   I
personally do not know the history. *But I believe* the concept is that
when Sun bought out its license and was able to open source Solaris, the
code base that goes back to Brian's original implementation became
available at that point. Some one like Larry or Rob Gingell who lived some
of that transition might be able to offer those details.

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Re: [TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

[John Cowan]

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On Tue, Jan 11, 2022 at 10:48 AM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:


> I do believe that you are correct that both the sources (and associated
> binaries) to original nroff/groff and ditroff were licensed and needed and
> an AT&T license, but not the documents themselves.
>

I assume you mean s/groff/troff/.  There must have been some public access
to the documentation like this that allowed James Clark to develop groff in
the 1987-91 time frame, though.  It's still the *roff shipped with *BSD.

dformat, a pic preprocessor by Jon Bentley that displays bits-in-a-word
pictures, is now available at <https://github.com/arnoldrobbins/dformat>;
it's written in awk.

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Re: [TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

[Clem Cole]

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Yeah, but the original Wang CAT4 version of troff was available without the
extra license - its in the BSD tree.  Now that was tied to the original
UNIX license of course but it was available.   Many (??most??) sites use
the vcat program that Tom Ferrin wrote that used the Hershey Fonts to plot
the output on a Versatec or later Varian plotter.   The original Imagen
which was forked from a Stanford project used that scheme until Adobe
released Transcript.

Brian's Device Independent Troff (ditroff) took another license
either source or binary redistribution.  DEC for instance, offered it as a
layered product to Ultrix, and I think Sun did the same thing.   At
Masscomp I convinced management that tracking the sites that had it and
which did not was too much of a PITA and if we just paid AT&T $15 and Adobe
$1 a system, Engineering could just assume it was there.

Of course, Tim and Dale both saw ditroff at Masscomp and took that (and
Steve Talbot's modified mS macros and Janet Egan's set of book making
tools) with them to ORA when they wrote the original NutShell book suite.
I'm not sure Tim ever saw the original troff because as soon as I got
there, I bought the ditroff and transcript licenses and rid us of the CAT4
stuff.

Clem

On Tue, Jan 11, 2022 at 11:56 AM Richard Salz <rich.salz@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, Jan 11, 2022 at 10:49 AM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> On Mon, Jan 10, 2022 at 9:43 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>>
>>> It's docs.  The *roff docs were locked up with the Unix license.
>>
>>
>> Larry point taken but ... I'm not so sure that specific statement is true.
>>
>
> I read it as s/locked up with/useless without/
>
>

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Re: [TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

[Richard Salz]

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On Tue, Jan 11, 2022 at 10:49 AM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

>
> On Mon, Jan 10, 2022 at 9:43 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
>> It's docs.  The *roff docs were locked up with the Unix license.
>
>
> Larry point taken but ... I'm not so sure that specific statement is true.
>

I read it as s/locked up with/useless without/

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Re: [TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

[Clem Cole]

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On Mon, Jan 10, 2022 at 9:43 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> It's docs.  The *roff docs were locked up with the Unix license.


Larry point taken but ... I'm not so sure that specific statement is true.

It may have >>seemed<< that way to you, but I'm fairly sure that in fact,
it was not.   The documents were published independently to the source and
use of the binary license.  I do think that some had an AT&T copyright on
them, but I'm not even sure all of them had a copyright associated.   The
AT&T license in fact explicitly allowed replication of the documents that
came with UNIX could be duplicated and distributed without violating the
license.  Numerous people sold copies of them.  Any (student or not) could
go into the MIT or Harvard Coop and buy a copy.   Same in the Berkeley
area, IIRC Stacy's [a famous Telgraph ave bookstore] had the BSD (as well
as other systems) manuals.

Beyond base duplication, numerous companies published parts of them and in
particular parts if not all of the roff manual.  For instance, a firm in
Seattle called CSSC published a number of reference guides and use guides
based on them [I just found a number of copies of some of them this weekend
as I'm resetting up my basement. I have a number of duplicates that I am
offering to the hive BTW].

I do believe that you are correct that both the sources (and associated
binaries) to original nroff/groff and ditroff were licensed and needed and
an AT&T license, but not the documents themselves.

Clem

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Re: [TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

[Larry McVoy]

On Tue, Jan 11, 2022 at 01:50:40AM -0700, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> > Tim O'Reilly got it, wrote a book about it but I think it was
> > too little too late.
> 
> That book was open sourced ~ 2 decades ago. It was scanned, OCR'ed
> and converted back into troff. See https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/utp/
> and in particular https://github.com/larrykollar/Unix-Text-Processing .

Yeah but it is 2022.  2 decades ago is 2002.  TeX was first released
in 1978.  So it had 2+ decades where it was out there, the docs were
out there, and Unix was doing the licensing dance.  It may be ancient
history but troff was not a given on every platform.  nroff was there
but troff was considered optional, you had to pay for it and a lot of
vendors didn't see the value.  So the docs and you weren't sure if you
would have it at your next job, not good.

I really wish it were different, I adore troff, I wrote something
called webroff that took -ms input and produced our website (until
we got marketing people and they replaced it with something "better",
better my ass).  I've written papers in TeX and while it isn't horrible,
it's not great, I see nothing there that makes me want it over roff.

Re: [TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

[arnold]

"Greg 'groggy' Lehey" <grog@lemis.com> wrote:

>  But the macros they (also, primarily, Dale Dougherty)
> described there are the basis for the macros they used at ORA when I
> started writing for them in 1993.  Some time round the turn of the
> millennium they then migrated to DocBook, at least for the author
> interface.  I think that they had some magic to then convert it to
> groff.  So I don't think it was "too late"; the DocBook conversion
> suggests that the authors didn't like groff, though I thought that the
> conversion was a retrograde step.

The DocBook conversion make it easy for them to generate HTML so
that books could be put on CD and browsed with a web browser.
I believe that was the main motivation.

I wrote the second edition of "sed & awk" in troff and then they
"converted" it to DocBook (with said backend that went back to
troff for producing print).  The conversion to DocBook was a disaster,
such that I threatened to cancel doing the book.

A lot of manual work later, the book came out OK, but boy was it painful.

That backend was still in use ~ 2004 when I did "Unix In A Nutshell"
and "Classic Shell Scripting" but they have moved on since then.

Arnold

P.S. Eric Raymond's love of DocBook not withstanding, it's a miserable
markup language to have to work in.

Re: [TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

[arnold]

Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> Tim O'Reilly got it, wrote a book about it but I think it was
> too little too late.

That book was open sourced ~ 2 decades ago. It was scanned, OCR'ed
and converted back into troff. See https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/utp/
and in particular https://github.com/larrykollar/Unix-Text-Processing .

Arnold

Re: [TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

[John Labovitz]

On Jan 11, 2022, at 00:12, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@lemis.com> wrote:

> For a time perspective, this was 1987, before O'Reilly and Associates
> was founded.  But the macros they (also, primarily, Dale Dougherty)
> described there are the basis for the macros they used at ORA when I
> started writing for them in 1993.  Some time round the turn of the
> millennium they then migrated to DocBook, at least for the author
> interface.  I think that they had some magic to then convert it to
> groff.  So I don't think it was "too late"; the DocBook conversion
> suggests that the authors didn't like groff, though I thought that the
> conversion was a retrograde step.

I think I can help fill out this puzzle. I started working for O’Reilly (specifically, for Dale) in late 1993, around the time the *roff -> DocBook/SGML transition was happening. I was hired to help develop Global Network Navigator, the first commercial website. Initially I created the first web ads (sorry) and later I was technical director of GNN.

I recall that it wasn’t so much that people ‘didn’t like’ groff and its ilk, but that Tim and Dale realized that the future of publishing was going to be something far beyond simply print books, and they needed their content to have much more inherent structure and metadata than was offered by groff markup — whose purpose was primarily as a markup language for print.

So the solution (as I observed it when I was there) was to translate the raw groff into a more abstract, structural markup — namely, SGML using the DocBook schema — and then to write conversion tools that would then re-generate groff, HTML, or something else. (The web/HTML was not necessarily the only future at that time!) That workflow also allowed manuscripts to be imported from other platforms (like Word) from authors who weren’t part of the Unix world, as O’Reilly branched out from strict Unix manuals into travel, finance, and other diverse worlds of content.

For example, we were able to fairly easily republish the seminal _Whole Internet Catalog_ book as a major section of the GNN website, using commercial SGML->HTML tools plus a whole lotta Perl. :)

—John

Re: [TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

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On Monday, 10 January 2022 at 18:42:18 -0800, Larry McVoy wrote:
> It's docs.  The *roff docs were locked up with the Unix license.
> Those docs were awesome, terse but full of info like the C book.
> Unlike the C book they were not readily available.  My Uni had a
> Unix license so I still have the stack of docs, decades later,
> still useful.

Are these the PSD docs that are included with FreeBSD, or something
else?

> Tim O'Reilly got it, wrote a book about it but I think it was too
> little too late.

For a time perspective, this was 1987, before O'Reilly and Associates
was founded.  But the macros they (also, primarily, Dale Dougherty)
described there are the basis for the macros they used at ORA when I
started writing for them in 1993.  Some time round the turn of the
millennium they then migrated to DocBook, at least for the author
interface.  I think that they had some magic to then convert it to
groff.  So I don't think it was "too late"; the DocBook conversion
suggests that the authors didn't like groff, though I thought that the
conversion was a retrograde step.

Greg
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Re: [TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

[Adam Thornton]

Taking this to COFF...

> On Jan 10, 2022, at 7:13 PM, Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM) <lyndon@orthanc.ca> wrote:
> 
> Greg 'groggy' Lehey writes:
> 
>> As long as man pages are formatted with ?roff, I don't see it going
>> away.  I don't suppose many people use troff any more, but there are
>> enough of us, and as long as man pages stay the way they are, I don't
>> think we're in any danger.
> 
> Well there is mandoc(1).  But as time goes by they just seem to be
> re-implementing nroff.  Of course that *must* be easier than just
> learning n/troff in the first place :-P

As someone who did a lot of a Ph.D. in the history of computing, and then went into IT because he liked eating protein sometimes:

The great secret is that NO ONE EVER READS THE LITERATURE.

We have now made all the mistakes at least four times:

Once for each of mainframes, minis, micros, and mobile.

You can be a rock star at any development or operations job, even if you are, like me, a Bear Of Little Brain, simply by having some idea of what was tried already to solve a problem like this, and why it didn't work.

Which you can get by actually stopping to read up about your problem before diving headfirst into coding up a solution for it.

If you happen to get stinking rich from this advice, you can buy me a bottle of whiskey sometime.

Adam

Re: [TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

[Larry McVoy]

On Mon, Jan 10, 2022 at 06:13:43PM -0800, Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM) wrote:
> Greg 'groggy' Lehey writes:
> 
> > As long as man pages are formatted with ?roff, I don't see it going
> > away.  I don't suppose many people use troff any more, but there are
> > enough of us, and as long as man pages stay the way they are, I don't
> > think we're in any danger.
> 
> Well there is mandoc(1).  But as time goes by they just seem to be
> re-implementing nroff.  Of course that *must* be easier than just
> learning n/troff in the first place :-P
> 
> I really don't understand this need to throw troff overboard.  

It's docs.  The *roff docs were locked up with the Unix license.
Those docs were awesome, terse but full of info like the C book.
Unlike the C book they were not readily available.  My Uni had a
Unix license so I still have the stack of docs, decades later,
still useful.  

I firmly believe if those docs had been open source, freely 
available, whatever, we would all be using an evolved roff.

I tried to get Microsoft, weakly, to make Word spit out roff.
Never went anywhere and I think they would have screwed it 
up, there was a UI, Gremlin maybe?  Don't remember, but it 
spit out pic.  Horrible pic.

The world would be a better place if Word spit out readable 
and modifiable roff.  Imagine being in Word and going, yeah,
I know what it is trying to do, let me drop down to -ms and
do it.  And Word took your changes.

Tim O'Reilly got it, wrote a book about it but I think it was
too little too late.

Roff is not going to take over the world but Greg is right,
man pages will keep it here.  Some of us will help.

Re: [TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

[Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM)]

Greg 'groggy' Lehey writes:

> As long as man pages are formatted with ?roff, I don't see it going
> away.  I don't suppose many people use troff any more, but there are
> enough of us, and as long as man pages stay the way they are, I don't
> think we're in any danger.

Well there is mandoc(1).  But as time goes by they just seem to be
re-implementing nroff.  Of course that *must* be easier than just
learning n/troff in the first place :-P

I really don't understand this need to throw troff overboard.  The
code, both GNU and AT&T implementations, has been rock solid for
decades.  It's not like there are portability issues moving it
between platforms.  Provided the kiddies don't get in there and
linuxify the code, of course.

--lyndon

[TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

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On Monday, 10 January 2022 at 13:00:15 -0600, Blake McBride wrote:
> I like that groff and TeX are rock solid and well supported.  In fact, I
> wrote a report generator for a modern web development framework using
> troff.  I use it to develop reports on a routine basis.  (kissweb.org)
> Sadly, however, if word of their existence doesn't get out there, I see
> them both disappearing in not much longer than a generation.  This would be
> sad indeed.

As long as man pages are formatted with ?roff, I don't see it going
away.  I don't suppose many people use troff any more, but there are
enough of us, and as long as man pages stay the way they are, I don't
think we're in any danger.

Greg
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