Re: [TUHS] roff(7)

[George Michaelson <ggm@algebras.org>]

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In 79-82 Runoff got me my undergraduate texts formatted on a dec10.

Moving to work post degree on Unix and vms systems (my memory is that for
some reason VMS didn't have runoff) I had the Normalised "oh this must be
the same" hitting roff/nroff and got really confused by having both ms and
me macros.

Nobody seemed to be able to explain to me why you wanted both (the
mysteries and distinctions of v<X> vs BSD were completely lost to me at
this early stage). But macros aside, anyone who had used runoff had a
massively simpler path into roff than TeX. My future was set. The phd
students at Leeds looked down their noses at me for using cryptic .2 letter
inline magic. They were the high priests of things, I was just a computer
operator.  Watching them spend weeks and weeks wrangling a one em offset
problem stopping perfection in print was.. entertaining.

Then we somehow got ditroff at Leeds uni. That was really weird, because it
was obviously "better" but again nobody could explain why the di- bit
magically appeared. (We had a Benson- Varian slimey paper printer at some
fantastical dpi like 120 or 150 which turned up at the same time.) wasn't
this just Troff? Oh God, was it really called t/roff not troff...

The entire production path to lpr had some driver logic to put "--" cut
marks on the continuous paper so you knew where to guillotine from the
roll, but unfortunately was wired to US legal paper sizes not A4
(presumably some macro definitions file would have fixed this) I still have
a poem from the British computer society about the birth of the icl 2900
typeset in olde English, centred. That Benson-Varian  must have used damn
good printing because it's still readable 40 years later when parking
tickets (similar print process?) Fade out in a day.

It was also around the time that "tbl" had what we all thought was a bug,
drawing the horizontal boxlines off by one. Nobody at the time understood
this was to counteract a specific electromechanical printer issue inside
AT&T.  Since it was coming in BSD Unix I can imagine back inside Berkeley
people binning our complaints. If you don't remember which 1200bpi tape the
software came from, don't just complain at random...

The "pic" tool had also just hit, and it obviously didn't share those line
offset problems which made us all very suspicious: "ITS THE SAME PEOPLES
CODE" we shouted at each other (it wasnt) ...

G

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