From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: ggm@algebras.org (George Michaelson) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2017 19:59:23 -0700 Subject: Unix witticisms In-Reply-To: References: <1507105846.59d49c3693e82@www.paradise.net.nz> <20171006160108.GA3799@darioniedermann.it> <001001d33f14$bbfe0900$33fa1b00$@ronnatalie.com> <001201d33f16$d36999e0$7a3ccda0$@ronnatalie.com> Message-ID: My greatest hack of creation/origination was to combine EQN, TBL and TROFF to make a phone directory with giant ellipsis around people sharing offices and phone extensions, because the new PABX produced a visually boring directory and I was asked to re-produce the handmade version, after the typesetter who did it had retired. (this was a university) I didn't get remotely close to his hand-set product, but I did ok. I did wind up doing horrendous cheats which morally feel like a GOTO. Probably, somebody wiser could have done it more honestly. I only had to make one, nobody cared after we did that one but it was a thing of beauty. You've made me very happy recalling it. These tools were arcane, but damn, it was fun making them work. G On Fri, Oct 6, 2017 at 7:55 PM, George Michaelson wrote: > that may be what I am referring to. if you transpose horizontal and > vertical, this may be a hack, to get around a mispositioning logic. > > -g > > On Fri, Oct 6, 2017 at 7:48 PM, Ron Natalie wrote: >> >> tbl was a real hack. It wasn't so much designed for the troff CAT output as it was to drive nroff on a daisy wheel printer. Oddly, decades after I thought everbody (including me as a last troff holdout) had abandoned it for more wisiwyg text formatters someone sends me a manual. Tbl had a slight telltale glitch in that the vertical lines on the left and right side of the table almost always protruded one pixel too high. "Did you use tbl|troff to generate this?" I asked. Sure enough it was. >> >>