[TUHS] Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[TUHS] Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[tuhs]

No idea what COFF is, but in the early 1980s, two non-troff options on
the software side were -

1) TeX. From Donald Knuth, which means tau epsilon chi, pronounced tech
   not tex. The urban legend was upon seeing an inital copy of one of his
   books sometime in the 1970s, he yelled "blech!" and decided that if you
   wanted your documents to look right, you need to do be able to it
   yourself, and TeX rhymes with blech.

2) Scribe. From Brian Reid, of Carnegie-Mellon
   See http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/scribe.pdf

-Brian

Clem Cole clemc at ccc.com wrtoe:
> Not really UNIX -- so I'm BCC TUHS and moving to COFF
>
> On Tue, Jan 9, 2024 at 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[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Diomidis Spinellis]

Knuth opens his TeXbook, explaining TeX's origin and pronunciation.

“English words like ‘technology’ stem from a Greek root beginning with 
the letters τεχ…; and this same Greek word means art as well as 
technology.  Hence the name TeX, which is an uppercase form of τεχ.”

He then indeed introduces blecchhh, but he doesn't connect it with the 
absence of quality.

“Insiders pronounce the χ of TeX as a Greek chi, not as an ‘x’ so that 
TeX rhymes with the word blecchhh.”

(I couldn't help noticing that in my 1989 edition of the book, ellipsis 
after τεχ appears to be set as three periods ‘...’ rather than a real 
ellipsis ‘…’.  The (modern) Greek words for art  and technology are 
τέχνη (techni) and τεχνολογία (technologia), respectively.

Diomidis

On 10-Jan-24 20:50, tuhs@cuzuco.com wrote:
 > No idea what COFF is, but in the early 1980s, two non-troff options on
 > the software side were -
 >
 > 1) TeX. From Donald Knuth, which means tau epsilon chi, pronounced tech
 >     not tex. The urban legend was upon seeing an inital copy of one 
of his
 >     books sometime in the 1970s, he yelled "blech!" and decided that 
if you
 >     wanted your documents to look right, you need to do be able to it
 >     yourself, and TeX rhymes with blech.

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[segaloco via TUHS]

Just to swing this back around to V7 docs, this auction has been on eBay for a little bit now: https://www.ebay.com/itm/134767543042

After the link is an auction for the HRW V7 manuals, as well as a second Volume 1, the second edition of the Nemeth administration book, and a Fall '84 software catalog from AT&T.  I might jump on this in a week or so if it is still up, although all I really want is the software catalog.  That to say, if someone else does pick this up, all I'd ask is I would like to purchase the catalog then from you or otherwise see to it that it gets scanned.  Otherwise if I do pick it up, expect a follow up posting offering up the V7 pair, I'd take the other Volume 1 (and Nemeth book) to that uni bookshelf I donated a V7 Volume 2 binder to.  If you get this and disappear the software catalog into a memory hole, your mother is a hamster and father smells of elderberries.

- Matt G.

P.S. For those who don't go looking often but might be interested, these are currently listed on eBay in various places:

- 1 Bell Laboratories UNIX Release 3.0 User's Manual.
- 3 Western Electric UNIX Release 5.0 User's Manuals.
- 1 Western Electric UNIX Release 5.0 Error Message Manual.
- Lots of picture-less auctions (you're selling books, pictures are the least you can do...) of allegedly parts of the HRW UNIX SVR2 5 Volume set.  These are small form with metallic alphabet blocks otherwise resembling the motif on the V7 manuals cover.  Distinct from the black and red binders distributed closer to actual machine purchases.
- The usual gaggle of SVR3 and SVR4 manuals, there's always a rotation of them up so not going to point out specifics.

The Release 5.0 Error Message Manual is particularly interesting in that the cover looks virtually identical to the usual Release 5.0/System V motif but the text says "UNIX Operating System" instead of just "UNIX System" like the Release 5.0 and System V copies I have.  Most literature just says "UNIX System" so I suspect the "Operating" text is on earlier runs of the covers.  Just speculation though, can't say for certain.

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Mychaela Falconia]

Hi Matt,

> Just to swing this back around to V7 docs, this auction has been on eBay
> for a little bit now: https://www.ebay.com/itm/134767543042

I just snarfed it.  I am only interested in the V7 book pair; the other
3 books (extra vol1, the Nemeth book and the catalog you are most
interested in) will be going to you, my dear.  Please send me your
mailing/shipping address off-list.

> That to say, if someone else does pick this up, all I'd ask is I would like
> to purchase the catalog then from you or otherwise see to it that it gets
> scanned.

I have neither the setup nor the time to do any scanning, so I'll just
send you the physical book.

> If you get this and disappear the software catalog into a memory hole,
> your mother is a hamster and father smells of elderberries.

I hereby swear before my Goddesses that I shall not disappear that
catalog; if it arrives in my hands from the ebay seller, I shall do
everything in my power to get it to you, dear brother.

Mychaela N. Falconia, HPS

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Sebastien F4GRX]

Hi,

Very interesting trivia, I didnt know, thanks!


Funnily, this scribe document has a joke about hyp-

henation.


Sebastien


Le 10/01/2024 à 19:50, tuhs@cuzuco.com a écrit :
> No idea what COFF is, but in the early 1980s, two non-troff options on
> the software side were -
>
> 1) TeX. From Donald Knuth, which means tau epsilon chi, pronounced tech
>     not tex. The urban legend was upon seeing an inital copy of one of his
>     books sometime in the 1970s, he yelled "blech!" and decided that if you
>     wanted your documents to look right, you need to do be able to it
>     yourself, and TeX rhymes with blech.
>
> 2) Scribe. From Brian Reid, of Carnegie-Mellon
>     See http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/scribe.pdf
>
> -Brian
>
> Clem Cole clemc at ccc.com wrtoe:
>> Not really UNIX -- so I'm BCC TUHS and moving to COFF
>>
>> On Tue, Jan 9, 2024 at 12:19b /PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
>>
>>> On the subject of troff origins, in a world where troff didn't exist, and
>>> one purchases a C/A/T, what was the general approach to actually using the
>>> thing?  Was there some sort of datasheet the vendor supplied that the end
>>> user would have to program a driver around, or was there any sort of
>>> example code or other materials provided to give folks a leg up on using
>>> their new, expensive instrument?  Did they have any "packaged bundles" for
>>> users of prominent systems such as 360/370 OSs or say one of the DEC OSs?
>>>
>> Basically, the phototypesetter part was turnkey with a built-in
>> minicomputer with a paper tape unit, later a micro and a floppy disk as a
>> cost reduction.   The preparation for the typesetter was often done
>> independently, but often the vendor offered some system to prepare the PPT
>> or Floppy.  Different typesetter vendors targeted different parts of the
>> market, from small local independent newspapers (such as the one my sister
>> and her husband owned and ran in North Andover MA for many years), to
>> systems that Globe or the Times might.  Similarly, books and magazines
>> might have different systems (IIRC the APS-5 was originally targeted for
>> large book publishers).  This was all referred to as the 'pre-press'
>> industry and there were lots of players in different parts.
>>
>> Large firms that produced documentation, such as DEC, AT&T *et al*., and
>> even some universities, might own their own gear, or they might send it out
>> to be set.
>>
>> The software varied greatly, depending on the target customer.   For
>> instance, by the early 80s,  the Boston Globe's input system was still
>> terrible - even though the computers had gotten better.  I had a couple of
>> friends working there, and they used to b*tch about it.  But big newspapers
>> (and I expect many other large publishers) were often heavy union shops on
>> the back end (layout and presses), so the editors just wanted to set strips
>> of "column wide" text as the layout was manual.  I've forgotten the name of
>> the vendor of the typesetter they used, but it was one of the larger firms
>> -- IIRC, it had a DG Nova in it.    My sister used CompuGraphic Gear, which
>> was based on 8085's.  She had two custom editing stations and the
>> typesetter itself (it sucked).  The whole system was under $35K in
>> late-1970s money - but targeted to small newspapers like hers. In the
>> mid-1908s, I got her a Masscomp at a reduced price and put 6 Wyse-75
>> terminals on it, so she could have her folks edit their stories with vi,
>> run spell, and some of the other UNIX tools.  I then reverse-engineered the
>> floppy enough to split out the format she wanted for her stories -- she
>> used a manual layout scheme.  She still has to use the custom stuff for
>> headlines and some other parts, but it was a load faster and more parallel
>> (for instance, we wrote an awk script to generate the School Lunch menus,
>> which they published each week).
>>

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Dave Horsfall]

On Wed, 10 Jan 2024, tuhs@cuzuco.com wrote:

> No idea what COFF is, but in the early 1980s, two non-troff options on 
> the software side were -

COFF (Computer Old Farts Followers) is the sister list to this one; it was 
set up to take the off-topic posts from TUHS (I suggested the name to 
Warren).

Subscribe in the usual way...

-- Dave

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

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On Friday, 12 January 2024 at  9:48:54 +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Wed, 10 Jan 2024, tuhs@cuzuco.com wrote:
>
>> No idea what COFF is, but in the early 1980s, two non-troff options on
>> the software side were -
>
> COFF (Computer Old Farts Followers) is the sister list to this one; it was
> set up to take the off-topic posts from TUHS (I suggested the name to
> Warren).
>
> Subscribe in the usual way...

In fact, no.  I replied yesterday and first checked the details.
To subscribe, you need to ask Warren personally.

That's not the case for TUHS.  Warren, why the difference?

Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
This message is digitally signed.  If your Microsoft mail program
reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA.php

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[TUHS] Re: Subscribing to TUHS and COFF

[Warren Toomey via TUHS]

On Fri, Jan 12, 2024 at 10:47:24AM +1100, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> To subscribe, you need to ask Warren personally.
> That's not the case for TUHS.  Warren, why the difference?

For both COFF and TUHS you have to e-mail me personally to get on the list.
I've disabled the on-line subscription mechanism.

Cheers, Warren

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[G. Branden Robinson]

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Hi Lennart,

At 2024-01-18T15:45:55+0000, Lennart Jablonka wrote:
> Quoth John Gardner:
> > Thanks for reminding me, Branden. :) I've yet to get V7 Unix working with
> > the latest release of SimH, so that's kind of stalled my ability to develop
> > something in K&R-friendly  C.
> 
> I went ahead and write a little C/A/T-to-later-troff-output converter in
> v7-friendly and C89-conforming C:
> 
> https://git.sr.ht/~humm/catdit

This is an exciting prospect but I can't actually see anything there.

I get an error.

"401 Unauthorized

You don't have the necessary permissions to access this page. Index"

> I’m not confident in having got the details of spacing right (Is that
> 55-unit offset when switching font sizes correct?)

I've never heard of this C/A/T feature/wart before.  Huh.

> and the character codes emitted are still those of the C/A/T,
> resulting in the wrong glyphs being used.

The codes should probably be remapped by default, with a command-line
option to restore the original ones.  I would of course recommend
writing out 'C' commands with groff special character names.

> I created the attached document like this:
> 
> 	v7$ troff -t /usr/man/man0/title >title.cat
> 	host$ catdit <title.cat | dpost -F. -Tcat >title.ps
> 
> (Where do the two blank pages at the end come from?)

Good question; we may need to rouse a C/A/T expert.

> PS: Branden, for rougher results, if you happen to have a Tektronix
> 4014 at hand (like the one emulated by XTerm), you can use that to
> look at v7 troff’s output.  Tell your SIMH to pass control bytes
> through and run troff -t | tc.

I'd love to, just please make your repo available to the public.  :)

Regards,
Branden

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[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[G. Branden Robinson]

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Hi Mychaela,

At 2024-01-17T23:00:14-0800, Mychaela Falconia wrote:
> http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/7th_Edition/UNIX_Programmers_Manual_Seventh_Edition_January_1979_Volume_2A_SRI_Reprint_June_1980.pdf
> 
> 2) Page 235 of:
> 
> http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/7th_Edition/UNIX_Programmers_Manual_Seventh_Edition_Vol_2_1983.pdf
> 
> 3) Page 239 of:
> 
> http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/7th_Edition/VA-004A_UNIX_Programmers_Manual_Edition_Seven_Volume_2A_197901.pdf
> 
> 4) Page 499 of:
> 
> https://archive.org/details/uum-supplement-4.2bsd
> 
> Question to Branden: the scan you are referring to as "my scan", how
> does it compare to the 4 I just linked above?

By "my scan", I meant "the copy of the scan I happen to have handy",
rather than one I'd done myself.  What I had handy was the same as your
#2, above.

> If your scan has better quality than all 4 versions I linked above,
> can you please make it public?

Sorry to disappoint.  Thanks for all these links, though!  More people
should familiarize themselves with Volume 2 of the Seventh Edition
Manual, and I hope they will.

Regards,
Branden

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[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Mychaela Falconia]

Hi again John,

> I only meant "professional" insofar as aptitude with graphics is concerned.
> I won't accept money; I'm offering my labour out of love for typography,
> computer history and its preservation, and of course, the technology that
> got Unix the funding it needed to revolutionise computing. In any case,
> there's no actual "design" work involved: it's literally just tracing
> existing shapes to recreate an existing design. I do stuff like this
> <https://github.com/file-icons/icons#why-request-an-icon-cant-i-submit-a-pr>
> for *fun*, for crying out loud.

Sounds great!  If you are indeed serious about trying to recreate the
ancient C/A/T character set in PostScript fonts (or some other font
format that can be converted into a form that can be downloaded into a
genuine PostScript printer), I'll try to find some time to produce the
following:

1) A set of C/A/T binary files corresponding to that CSTR #54 manual,
as well as BWK's troff tutorial which usually follows right after in
book compilations.  This step is simply a matter of running the original
troff executable (with -t option) on the original source files for
these docs - but since I actually run an OS that still includes that
original version of troff and you said you don't, it would probably be
easier for me to produce and publish these files.

2) A converter tool from C/A/T binary codes to PostScript, using
whatever fonts you give it.  I'll test it initially using the set of
fonts which I developed for my 4.3BSD-Quasijarus pstroff - all
characters will be there, all positioning will come from original
troff, but it won't look pretty because most PS native font characters
don't match those of C/A/T.  Then as you progress with your font
drawing project, you should be able to substitute your fonts instead
of mine, and see how the output improves.

> Nice! The more material I have, the merrier. As for the scan that Branden
> and I were referring to, I've uploaded a copy to Dropbox

Using pdfimages utility with -list option, I compared the image format
and resolution in various scans I described in my previous mail, plus
this new one you just shared, and concluded that the best quality is
contained in these two:

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/7th_Edition/UNIX_Programmers_Manual_Seventh_Edition_January_1979_Volume_2A_SRI_Reprint_June_1980.pdf

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/7th_Edition/VA-004A_UNIX_Programmers_Manual_Edition_Seven_Volume_2A_197901.pdf

Here are extracted PNG images of just the relevant page from both PDFs:

https://www.freecalypso.org/members/falcon/troff/cstr54-fontpage-sri.png
https://www.freecalypso.org/members/falcon/troff/cstr54-fontpage-ucb.png

Each PNG is a lossless extract from the corresponding PDF, made with
pdfimages utility.  Each image is described as being 600x600 DPI in
PDF metadata, and the print is said to be in 12 point - numbers for
converting from pixels to .001m units in font reconstruction...

M~

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Mychaela Falconia]

John Gardner wrote:

> I'm a professional graphic designer with access to commercial typeface
> authoring software. Send me the highest-quality and most comprehensive
> scans of a C/A/T-printed document, and I'll get to work.

Are you offering to donate your labor in terms of typeface design, or
will it be a type of deal where the community will need to collectively
pitch in money to cover the cost of you doing it professionally?

In either case, the "C/A/T-printed document" of most value to this
project would be the same one G. Branden Robinson is referring to:

> If you don't have my scan of CSTR #54 (1976), which helpfully dumps all
> of the glyphs in the faces used by the Bell Labs CSRC C/A/T-4, let me
> know and I'll send it along.  I won't vouch for its high quality but it
> should be comprehensive with respect to coverage.

The paper in question is Nroff/Troff User's Manual by Joseph F. Ossanna,
dated 1976-10-11, which was indeed also CSTR #54.  The document is 33
pages long in its original form, and page 31 out of the 33 is the most
interesting one for the purpose of font recreation: it is the page that
exhibits all 4 fonts of 102 characters each.  Here are the few published
scans I am aware of:

1) Page 245 of:

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/7th_Edition/UNIX_Programmers_Manual_Seventh_Edition_January_1979_Volume_2A_SRI_Reprint_June_1980.pdf

2) Page 235 of:

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/7th_Edition/UNIX_Programmers_Manual_Seventh_Edition_Vol_2_1983.pdf

3) Page 239 of:

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/7th_Edition/VA-004A_UNIX_Programmers_Manual_Edition_Seven_Volume_2A_197901.pdf

4) Page 499 of:

https://archive.org/details/uum-supplement-4.2bsd

Question to Branden: the scan you are referring to as "my scan", how
does it compare to the 4 I just linked above?  If your scan has better
quality than all 4 versions I linked above, can you please make it
public?

M~

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Rich Salz]

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https://usenet.trashworldnews.com/?thread=614089 posted February 1988

Perl Kit, Version 1.0, Copyright (c) 1987, Larry Wall

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[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Clem Cole]

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Larry wrote it for admin help of his 4.1 BSD vaxen at NASA.   (Which was
PCC based compiler K&R1 syntax).  I  do not remember if any one tried to
get it running on the 11 because of address space issues.  As Brad says you
can check all usenet files.

Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual


On Wed, Jan 17, 2024 at 9:33 AM Brad Spencer <brad@anduin.eldar.org> wrote:

> "G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> writes:
>
> [snip]
>
> > (Which isn't to say that one _can't_ write safe code using K&R C; my
> > fear is that having to remember all of the things the compiler won't do
> > for you would overwhelm the task at hand.  Too bad Unix V7 didn't have
> > Perl, since this is basically a text transformation problem.)
> >
> > Regards,
> > Branden
>
>
> I may be very much misremembering this, but I think that Perl 3 might
> exist for V7.  I have very vague memories of bring up V7 in SimH and
> noted that a perl binary existed there.... but it might have been 2.x
> BSD...(this is actually the most likely) or something else in SimH.  All
> of the history says Perl 1 was created in late 1987, so V7 certainly
> would have been around and I wouldn't be suprised that someone attempted
> to port it.  I could not find which OS Perl was an initial target for
> and I didn't want to grovel though the old Usenet posts.
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Brad Spencer - brad@anduin.eldar.org - KC8VKS - http://anduin.eldar.org
>

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[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Brad Spencer]

"G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> writes:

[snip]

> (Which isn't to say that one _can't_ write safe code using K&R C; my
> fear is that having to remember all of the things the compiler won't do
> for you would overwhelm the task at hand.  Too bad Unix V7 didn't have
> Perl, since this is basically a text transformation problem.)
>
> Regards,
> Branden


I may be very much misremembering this, but I think that Perl 3 might
exist for V7.  I have very vague memories of bring up V7 in SimH and
noted that a perl binary existed there.... but it might have been 2.x
BSD...(this is actually the most likely) or something else in SimH.  All
of the history says Perl 1 was created in late 1987, so V7 certainly
would have been around and I wouldn't be suprised that someone attempted
to port it.  I could not find which OS Perl was an initial target for
and I didn't want to grovel though the old Usenet posts.





-- 
Brad Spencer - brad@anduin.eldar.org - KC8VKS - http://anduin.eldar.org

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[G. Branden Robinson]

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Hi John,

At 2024-01-18T00:43:41+1100, John Gardner wrote:
> I'm a professional graphic designer with access to commercial typeface
> authoring software. Send me the highest-quality and most comprehensive
> scans of a C/A/T-printed document, and I'll get to work.

If you don't have my scan of CSTR #54 (1976), which helpfully dumps all
of the glyphs in the faces used by the Bell Labs CSRC C/A/T-4, let me
know and I'll send it along.  I won't vouch for its high quality but it
should be comprehensive with respect to coverage.

> Thanks for reminding me, Branden. :) I've yet to get V7 Unix working
> with the latest release of SimH,

Let me know in private mail where you got stuck.  Maybe I can help.

> I'm still up for this, assuming you've not already started.

No, I haven't--perhaps because I am an Ada fanboy, the prospect of
coding in pre-standard C and its mission to turn anything that can be
lexically analyzed into _some_ sequence of machine instructions has not
stoked my excitement.

(Which isn't to say that one _can't_ write safe code using K&R C; my
fear is that having to remember all of the things the compiler won't do
for you would overwhelm the task at hand.  Too bad Unix V7 didn't have
Perl, since this is basically a text transformation problem.)

Regards,
Branden

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[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Clem Cole]

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Not really UNIX -- so I'm BCC TUHS and moving to COFF

On Tue, Jan 9, 2024 at 12:19 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:

> On the subject of troff origins, in a world where troff didn't exist, and
> one purchases a C/A/T, what was the general approach to actually using the
> thing?  Was there some sort of datasheet the vendor supplied that the end
> user would have to program a driver around, or was there any sort of
> example code or other materials provided to give folks a leg up on using
> their new, expensive instrument?  Did they have any "packaged bundles" for
> users of prominent systems such as 360/370 OSs or say one of the DEC OSs?
>
Basically, the phototypesetter part was turnkey with a built-in
minicomputer with a paper tape unit, later a micro and a floppy disk as a
cost reduction.   The preparation for the typesetter was often done
independently, but often the vendor offered some system to prepare the PPT
or Floppy.  Different typesetter vendors targeted different parts of the
market, from small local independent newspapers (such as the one my sister
and her husband owned and ran in North Andover MA for many years), to
systems that Globe or the Times might.  Similarly, books and magazines
might have different systems (IIRC the APS-5 was originally targeted for
large book publishers).  This was all referred to as the 'pre-press'
industry and there were lots of players in different parts.

Large firms that produced documentation, such as DEC, AT&T *et al*., and
even some universities, might own their own gear, or they might send it out
to be set.

The software varied greatly, depending on the target customer.   For
instance, by the early 80s,  the Boston Globe's input system was still
terrible - even though the computers had gotten better.  I had a couple of
friends working there, and they used to b*tch about it.  But big newspapers
(and I expect many other large publishers) were often heavy union shops on
the back end (layout and presses), so the editors just wanted to set strips
of "column wide" text as the layout was manual.  I've forgotten the name of
the vendor of the typesetter they used, but it was one of the larger firms
-- IIRC, it had a DG Nova in it.    My sister used CompuGraphic Gear, which
was based on 8085's.  She had two custom editing stations and the
typesetter itself (it sucked).  The whole system was under $35K in
late-1970s money - but targeted to small newspapers like hers. In the
mid-1908s, I got her a Masscomp at a reduced price and put 6 Wyse-75
terminals on it, so she could have her folks edit their stories with vi,
run spell, and some of the other UNIX tools.  I then reverse-engineered the
floppy enough to split out the format she wanted for her stories -- she
used a manual layout scheme.  She still has to use the custom stuff for
headlines and some other parts, but it was a load faster and more parallel
(for instance, we wrote an awk script to generate the School Lunch menus,
which they published each week).

ᐧ

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[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Al Kossow]

On 1/9/24 12:29 PM, Al Kossow wrote:
> On 1/9/24 9:18 AM, segaloco via TUHS wrote:
> 
>> On the subject of troff origins, in a world where troff didn't exist, and one purchases a C/A/T, what was the general approach to actually 
>> using the thing? 
> Short answer is you bought their proprietary typesetting turnkey systems
> 
> They had to reverse-engineer the phototypesetter hardware to work with any homegrown software to drive it.
> 

and that is a very deep rathole I've gone down before with Compugraphic typesetters

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Al Kossow]

On 1/9/24 9:18 AM, segaloco via TUHS wrote:

> On the subject of troff origins, in a world where troff didn't exist, and one purchases a C/A/T, what was the general approach to actually using the thing? 
Short answer is you bought their proprietary typesetting turnkey systems

They had to reverse-engineer the phototypesetter hardware to work with any homegrown software to drive it.

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Grant Taylor via TUHS]

On 1/9/24 12:05 PM, Phil Budne wrote:
> Two VT20/B terminals were connected to single PDP-11/05 (a variant 
> of the 11/10) which was connected via RS232 to a host system, 
> either a larger PDP-11 or a DECsystem-10, running Typeset-11 or 
> Typeset-10.

Does that mean that the PDP-11/05 was functioning similarly to -- what I 
believe is called -- a terminal controller in IBM SNA parlance?

The booting (2nd stage) from the host over the serial connection thereto 
really seems familiar.  }:-)



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Phil Budne]

Matt G wrote:
> On the subject of troff origins, in a world where troff didn't
> exist, and one purchases a C/A/T, what was the general approach to
> actually using the thing? ...  or say one of the DEC OSs?

Off-topic for this list, BUT:

At DEC/LCG (Large (36-bit) Computer Group) in the 80's when we got a
DEC LN01 (Xerox 2700 engine?) someone adapted an old typesetter
version of RUNOFF to drive it.  I heard tell that there was a dusty
C/A/T in one of the labs.

Mentions of Typeset-8, Typeset-10, and Typeset-11:
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp10/typeset-10/Typeset-10_Product_Proposal_197310.pdf

Typeset-8:
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp8/typeset8/
https://www.hewlettpackardhistory.com/item/at-the-turn-of-a-key/

  Digital Equipment Corporation’s TYPESET-8 pioneered the “turnkey”
  computer system, where a system was custom designed for a specific
  application and was ready to perform that application at the press
  of a button (or the turn of a key). The TYPESET-8 hardware and
  software package originally sold with the classic PDP-8 as its CPU
  and functioned as a computerized typesetting system. Digital
  Equipment Corporation joined Hewlett-Packard in 2002.

Typeset-11:
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp11/typeset-11/

TMS-11 is pretty sophisticated: RSX-11D with options a real disk
(RP03) or RK05, and a swap device (RF11/RS11), OCR input, VT20 (VT05 +
11/05-- first I've heard of it) but still with up to four paper tape
readers/punches.

The diagram at
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp11/typeset-11/EK-T11SY-OP-001_TMS-11_System_Managers_and_Usrs_Guide_Feb1975.pdf
shows direct hardware connection to a "photocomp machine", or via punched tape.

But, I haven't spotted any mention of specific typesetter hardware.

https://terminals-wiki.org/wiki/index.php/DEC_VT20 says:
The DEC VT20 terminal is a variant of the DEC VT05 terminal with special facilities for typesetting.

The VT20/B is another variant with a different enclosure.

  Two VT20/B terminals were connected to single PDP-11/05 (a variant
  of the 11/10) which was connected via RS232 to a host system, either
  a larger PDP-11 or a DECsystem-10, running Typeset-11 or
  Typeset-10. Newspapers using Typeset-10 were The Kansas City Star,
  the Chicago Tribune, and the London, Ontario, Free Press. The
  PDP-11/05 was booted by toggling in the bootstrap using the switches
  on the front of the machine, then downloading the abs loader and
  actual software through the RS232 interface from the host. The
  PDP-11/05 buffered text (news stories) downloaded from the host and
  allowed editing on the VT20. On Typeset-11 it was page oriented, a
  page would be downloaded, edited, then uploaded back to the host. On
  Typeset-10 the text was downloaded, but an associated memory system
  mirrored changes made on the text in the -11 to a copy on the
  -10. When the "save" button was pressed, the text was copied from
  associative memory into the actual text file on the
  DECsystem-10. This allowed for virtual scrolling through large files
  without having to save and load pages. The VT20s were eventually
  replaced by the VT72s, which featured a micro PDP-11 internally,
  with twice the memory of the old PDP-11/05s that controlled the
  VT20s. Interestingly enough, Digital no longer supported the
  associative memory version of the editing software, requiring page
  level editing. The Kansas City Star rewrote the PDP-11 software for
  the VT20s to run on the VT72, allowing for further virtual scrolling
  of large files, and making saving edits faster. The VT72 was
  replaced by the VT172, virtually the same terminal but in a VT100

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[segaloco via TUHS]

On Tuesday, January 9th, 2024 at 8:27 AM, Al Kossow <aek@bitsavers.org> wrote:


> Tracing the origins of the typefaces used on the GSI/Wang typesetter is a fun rathole
> going back to Singer Graphic Systems and to Singer-Friden (ie Flexowriter) before that
> 

On the subject of troff origins, in a world where troff didn't exist, and one purchases a C/A/T, what was the general approach to actually using the thing?  Was there some sort of datasheet the vendor supplied that the end user would have to program a driver around, or was there any sort of example code or other materials provided to give folks a leg up on using their new, expensive instrument?  Did they have any "packaged bundles" for users of prominent systems such as 360/370 OSs or say one of the DEC OSs?

Similarly, were any vendor-or-locally-provided solutions used prior to the maturation of troff to the point it was used for the Fourth Edition manual typesetting?  Or was the C/A/T from day one of "production" use being driven pretty much exclusively by troff?  I admit my knowledge of this stuff is fuzzy, such as whether troff+C/A/T was the plan from the outset of acquiring the C/A/T or if there was ever a time where folks at research may have been cooking on a different approach to using the thing.

- Matt G.

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Al Kossow]

Tracing the origins of the typefaces used on the GSI/Wang typesetter is a fun rathole
going back to Singer Graphic Systems and to Singer-Friden (ie Flexowriter) before that

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Mychaela Falconia]

G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:

> Right.  Nowadays we call these (and other measurements besides width)
> the "font metrics".

Not just "nowadays": font metrics has always been the standard term,
including original troff days.  But I specifically said "spacing widths"
because it is the _only_ metric that matters for the purpose of pleasing
otroff and keeping all line and page breaks where they were originally.

All other metrics matter not in the "pleasing otroff" category, but in
the category of "visual beauty" or "recreating exact appearance", which
would be next-level-up from simply satisfying otroff.

> You will quickly observe that the C/A/T's "Special Mathematical Font",
> bearing the pellucid name "S" in the Ossanna/Thompson naming convention
> popular at Bell Labs, renders all its lowercase Greek letters in italic
> form.  PostScript's Symbol font does not.

Yes, this difference exists.  However, let me point out that *both*
official troff-to-PS toolchains that existed in traditional UNIX world
(Adobe TranScript is one and Bell Labs DWB is the other) took the path
of accepting non-slanted Greek letters as-is from Symbol.  Seeing that
Bell Labs themselves deemed this change as acceptable tells me that
the slanted nature of lowercase Greek letters in original typesetter
fonts (C/A/T, APS-5) was not considered an absolutely essential feature
of these characters that MUST be preserved in every new troff
implementation.

> "Slanted symbol", a.k.a. "SS", is a supplemental face in groff...of old
> provenance--it goes back to groff 1.06 (September 1992) at least.

OK, fair enough: your lineage made a different choice in this regard.
But seeing that both Adobe TranScript and Bell Labs' own later troff
took the same approach as I took in my troff (using Symbol as-is), I
don't feel guilty about not doing the same SS manipulation you do in
groff.

There is also a historical/timeline factor for me: A.D. 2010 was the
first time I laid my eyes on the output of a traditional pre-PostScript
troff typesetter (that was when I scored a physical copy of 4.3BSD
books), and by that point I had been using my own troff for 6 y since
2004.  Yes, I wrote it blindly at first: because of my younger age, I
didn't get to live through the era of traditional typesetters, I
totally missed it, but I needed a working troff under my then-production
OS (4.3BSD) - so what was I supposed to do?...

M~

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[G. Branden Robinson]

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At 2024-01-07T21:10:38-0800, Mychaela Falconia wrote:
> G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > This sort of broad, nonspecific, reflexive derogation of groff (or
> > GNU generally) is unproductive and frequently indicative of
> > ignorance.
> 
> I don't have enough spoons to engage in political fights any more, so
> I'll just focus on technical aspects.

That may be a wise choice.  A good supplement would be, when expressing
a negative opinion of GNU or any software project to which people
contribute their volunteer labor, to briefly state your grounds for not
using it.  "I just can't go along with the copyleft thing" or "I refuse
to use anything written in C++" might or might not strike people as
rational, but such frankness places the responsibility for starting an
argument squarely on _their_ shoulders.

Any issues people have with groff's implementation quality should be
submitted to its bug tracker.  (One can do so anonymously, or create an
account to be emailed when subsequent activity happens.)  There are
plenty of defects demanding repair and features needing implementation.
I wish there were fewer.  I do what I can.

https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=groff

> > But if you are going for pixel-perfect reproduction of documents
> > that used fonts you don't have, you're going to need to recreate the
> > fonts somehow--perfectly (at least for the glyphs that a given
> > document uses).
> 
> The problem you are describing is one which I am *not* actively
> working on presently.  I am _contemplating_ this problem, but not
> actively working on it.  In my current stage of 4.3BSD document set
> reprinting, I am willing to accept that hyphenations, line breaks and
> page breaks will be different from the original because of slightly
> different font metrics, and accept the use of only fi and fl ligatures
> (in running text, outside of explicit demonstrations) because Adobe's
> version dropped ff, ffi and ffl.  (In places where original troff docs
> explicitly demonstrate the use of all 5 ligatures, I have a hack that
> pulls the missing ligs from a different, not-really-matching font.)
> 
> I am willing to accept this imperfection because it is fundamentally
> no different from what UCB/Usenix themselves did in 1986: they took
> Bell Labs docs that were originally written for CAT and troffed them
> on their APS-5 ditroff setup - but those two typesetters also had
> slight diffs in their font metrics, causing line and page breaks to
> move around!

Right.  I think this is a reasonable place to erect a threshold of
"fidelity" in document rendering, for two reasons: (1) when you don't
have control over the fonts in use, it's likely the best you can do
anyway, and (2) as a document author you might want to leave yourself
room to change your mind about the typeface you use, particularly for
running text (which will have the greatest impact on the locations of
line and page breaks for most documents).

That I was able to get the breaks in "Typesetting Mathematics" almost
all the same as the published version even though the Times I used was
certainly not the C/A/T's was a due to a combination of (a) good fortune
and (b) the power of binary search when selecting values for the LL and
PO registers.

> OTOH I am very willing to entertain, as an intellectual exercise, what
> would it take to produce a new font set that would *truly* replicate
> the CAT font set at Bell Labs.  The spacing widths of the original
> fonts (the key determinant of where breaks will land) are known, right
> here:
>
> https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/troff/tab3.c

Right.  Nowadays we call these (and other measurements besides width)
the "font metrics".

> Back in 2004 in one afternoon I threw together a quick-hack program
> that takes the output of original troff (CAT binary codes) and prints
> it in PostScript, using standard Adobe fonts.  The character
> positioning is that of original troff, but because the actual font
> characters don't perfectly match these metrics, the result is not
> pretty - but the non-pretty result does show *exactly* where every
> line and page break lands per original intent!

Nice!  A tool I'd like to get added to groff someday is a modern
"cat2dit".  It's come up on these mailing lists before; apparently Adobe
had a proprietary one back in the 1980s, and, as I recall, polymath
wizard Henry Spencer wrote one but it's long since become a relic.  John
Gardner wrote yet another but it's in JavaScript so not maximally
convenient for a Unix command line grognard.

But best of all would be a "cat2dit" in Seventh Edition Unix-compatible
C, because that would be super convenient for running on a PDP-11 under
SIMH using Ossanna troff.  The output would be easy to export because
the device-independent troff output format is plain text (and not too
strict about whitespace), and SIMH of course runs in a terminal window
so it's easy to copy and paste.  This would make it much easier to use
Ossanna troff as a regression test bed for groff (or other modern
formatters).

> So what would it take to do such a re-creation properly?  My feeling
> is that the task would require hiring a professional typeface designer
> to produce a modified version of Times font family: modify the fonts
> to produce good visual results (change actual characters as needed) to
> fit the prescribed, unchangeable metrics as in spacing widths.  And
> design all 5 f-ligatures while at it.

Another approach would be to obtain the C/A/T font plates and describe
them numerically.  Since the only means of scaling was via an optical
lens (from 6 to 36 points), we can conclude that they weren't "hinted"
as digital fonts often are.  Since those plates are presumably nearly
all in landfills these days I suppose the same could be accomplished
with sufficiently high-resolution scans of the copy of CSTR #54 in the
Seventh Edition Unix manual (because it depicts all possibly glyphs).

And of course if a person wants a gratuitous thing to put on their
résumé/CV, you could obtain a large number of Times roman faces from a
variety of foundries, render a huge volume of text using them in every
possible combination and at a large number of sizes, and then use those
renderings to train an LLM to generate an "archetypal" Times face for
rendering C/A/T-produced documents.  You then unleash it on the world
and wait for the lawsuits to roll in, which should get a person enough
notoriety to land a day job at someplace where the buzzword "AI" excites
hard-charging middle managers.

> I have no slightest idea how much it would cost to hire a professional
> typeface designer to do what I just described, hence I have no idea
> whether or not it is something that the hobbyist community could
> potentially afford, even collectively.  But it is an interesting idea
> to ponder nonetheless - which is where I leave it for now.

Hobbyist font designers do exist.  Some may lurk on one or both of these
lists.  I would ask them if it's more or less a solved problem already.

> > There is a third problem, whose resolution is in progress, when
> > producing PDF output from this document; slanted Greek symbols are
> > present but "not quite right".  This is because unlike PostScript,
> > PDF font repertoires generally don't provide a "slanted symbol"
> > face.
> 
> Can you please elaborate?  I personally hate PDF with a passion, but I
> concede that in order to make my documents readable by people other
> than me, I have to rcp my .ps file from the 4.3BSD machine to a
> semi-modern-ish (Slackware) Linux box and run ps2pdf on the file.

Doug McIlroy still does this.[1]

> But what "slanted symbol" font are you talking about that exists in
> PostScript but not in PDF?  The only PostScript fonts whose existence
> I take as a given (as opposed to downloading the font explicitly) are
> the standard 14: 4 Times family fonts, 4 Helvetica family fonts, 4
> Courier family fonts, Symbol and ZapfDingbats.  Which of these 14 is
> missing in PDF, and how does "standard" ps2pdf (Ghostscript) handle
> it?

Sorry, I elided too much from my response on this point.

I should not have implied that "slanted symbol" is a standard PostScript
font; it is not, per my copy of the _PostScript Language Reference
Manual_ (3e) [see Appendix E].

"Slanted symbol", a.k.a. "SS", is a supplemental face in groff...of old
provenance--it goes back to groff 1.06 (September 1992) at least.  It
exists to solve a problem that can be observed when you compare two
documents already referenced above.

1.  Adobe's _PostScript Language Reference Manual_, p. 794.  Table E.13,
    "Symbol Encoding Vector"
2.  CSTR #54 "Nroff/Troff User's Manual" (1976), p. 226*.  Table I,
    "Font Style Examples"

* using the page numbering in the HRW reprint of Volume 2 recently
  discussed on TUHS

You will quickly observe that the C/A/T's "Special Mathematical Font",
bearing the pellucid name "S" in the Ossanna/Thompson naming convention
popular at Bell Labs, renders all its lowercase Greek letters in italic
form.  PostScript's Symbol font does not.

A problem for any post-C/A/T typesetting is how to get upright versions
of lowercase Greek letters.  AT&T troff was engineered around the
assumption that the lowercase Greek letters typically used for
mathematical and scientific typesetting are slanted/italic rather than
upright.  This assumption is baked into the semantics of special
character names *a, *b, *g, and so forth.  (Except when using nroff, of
course, where one "naturally" expects upright glyphs instead, just like
the good old Greek box on the Teletype Model 37.)  The eqn preprocessor
furthermore--and consequently--assumes it doesn't need to do anything
special for these special characters to show up in italics (making its
rendering to terminals inconsistent with troff output).

If you couldn't guess, I plan to change this in groff.  It won't break
eqn documents because what I "take away" in the semantics of the special
characters (an implied font style, which doesn't belong there), I will
"put back" via updated eqn character definitions, so people who say

  sin ( 2 theta ) ~ = ~ 2 ~ sin theta cos theta

will continue to get what they expect.  eqn users who bust down to *roff
special characters to get Greek will, unfortunately, need to adapt.  But
GNU eqn has features to support doing so with minimal pain.[2]

I have read that modern standards of mathematical typography mandate
that constants, like every non-mathematician's favorite, π, should be
set upright, not italicized as people of my generation (and I guess
older ones) are accustomed to seeing it.  The idea is that only
_variables_ get italics.  But I cannot speak further to this point, as
it's well out of my wheelhouse.  If it's true, I hope the increased
flexibility I plan for groff and its eqn will make life easier for those
who typeset math.

https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?64231
https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?64232

gropdf(1) has not to date supported a slanted symbol font.  But it needs
to for the reasons explored on the groff list last June in a lengthy
thread, the relevant portion of which starts here.

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2023-06/msg00088.html

> I also wanted my troff to run under 4.3BSD, using only K&R C, which I
> reason would probably be impossible with groff.  (I recall reading
> somewhere that groff is written in C++ - so it is completely out of
> consideration for something that needs to run under 4.3BSD.)

Probably, unless someone wants to resurrect cfront...

C is not my favorite programming language, and C++ even less so.  In a
better universe, by my lights, James Clark would have written groff in
Ada.  I acknowledge that a lot of people would characterize such a
universe as a variety of Hell.

> My software is written BY a pirate (me) FOR other pirates.  If you are
> not a pirate, my sw is not for you.

Arrrrrr.  I believe I take your meaning.  Piracy is an occupational
hazard of rentierism.

Regards,
Branden

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2023-08/msg00028.html
[2] See eqn(1), subsection "Spacing and typeface".

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[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Mychaela Falconia]

G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:

> This sort of broad, nonspecific, reflexive derogation of groff (or GNU
> generally) is unproductive and frequently indicative of ignorance.

I don't have enough spoons to engage in political fights any more, so
I'll just focus on technical aspects.

> The C/A/T's fonts did not even exist in the digital domain.  They were
> produced from photographic plates.  Their reproduction is consequently
> something of a pickle.

I am very keenly aware of this fact!

> But if you are going for pixel-perfect reproduction of documents that
> used fonts you don't have, you're going to need to recreate the fonts
> somehow--perfectly (at least for the glyphs that a given document uses).

The problem you are describing is one which I am *not* actively working
on presently.  I am _contemplating_ this problem, but not actively
working on it.  In my current stage of 4.3BSD document set reprinting,
I am willing to accept that hyphenations, line breaks and page breaks
will be different from the original because of slightly different font
metrics, and accept the use of only fi and fl ligatures (in running
text, outside of explicit demonstrations) because Adobe's version
dropped ff, ffi and ffl.  (In places where original troff docs
explicitly demonstrate the use of all 5 ligatures, I have a hack that
pulls the missing ligs from a different, not-really-matching font.)

I am willing to accept this imperfection because it is fundamentally
no different from what UCB/Usenix themselves did in 1986: they took
Bell Labs docs that were originally written for CAT and troffed them
on their APS-5 ditroff setup - but those two typesetters also had
slight diffs in their font metrics, causing line and page breaks to
move around!

OTOH I am very willing to entertain, as an intellectual exercise, what
would it take to produce a new font set that would *truly* replicate
the CAT font set at Bell Labs.  The spacing widths of the original
fonts (the key determinant of where breaks will land) are known, right
here:

https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/troff/tab3.c

Back in 2004 in one afternoon I threw together a quick-hack program
that takes the output of original troff (CAT binary codes) and prints
it in PostScript, using standard Adobe fonts.  The character
positioning is that of original troff, but because the actual font
characters don't perfectly match these metrics, the result is not
pretty - but the non-pretty result does show *exactly* where every
line and page break lands per original intent!

So what would it take to do such a re-creation properly?  My feeling
is that the task would require hiring a professional typeface designer
to produce a modified version of Times font family: modify the fonts
to produce good visual results (change actual characters as needed) to
fit the prescribed, unchangeable metrics as in spacing widths.  And
design all 5 f-ligatures while at it.

I have no slightest idea how much it would cost to hire a professional
typeface designer to do what I just described, hence I have no idea
whether or not it is something that the hobbyist community could
potentially afford, even collectively.  But it is an interesting idea
to ponder nonetheless - which is where I leave it for now.

> There is a third problem, whose resolution is in progress, when
> producing PDF output from this document; slanted Greek symbols are
> present but "not quite right".  This is because unlike PostScript, PDF
> font repertoires generally don't provide a "slanted symbol" face.

Can you please elaborate?  I personally hate PDF with a passion, but I
concede that in order to make my documents readable by people other
than me, I have to rcp my .ps file from the 4.3BSD machine to a
semi-modern-ish (Slackware) Linux box and run ps2pdf on the file.
But what "slanted symbol" font are you talking about that exists in
PostScript but not in PDF?  The only PostScript fonts whose existence
I take as a given (as opposed to downloading the font explicitly) are
the standard 14: 4 Times family fonts, 4 Helvetica family fonts, 4
Courier family fonts, Symbol and ZapfDingbats.  Which of these 14 is
missing in PDF, and how does "standard" ps2pdf (Ghostscript) handle it?

> Like AT&T troff, groff attempts to be a practical typesetting system.

I wrote *my* version of troff with exact same goals, and I've been
using it as my personal everyday TPS report formatter for the past 20 y.
It's just that for deeply personal reasons which I would rather not go
into on this list, I chose to develop my own tool instead of using one
that bears GNU branding.  I also wanted my troff to run under 4.3BSD,
using only K&R C, which I reason would probably be impossible with
groff.  (I recall reading somewhere that groff is written in C++ - so
it is completely out of consideration for something that needs to run
under 4.3BSD.)

> But there is room in the world for such things, particularly if they are
> Free Software.  I was unable to determine that qjtroff is, except for a
> few portions retaining UC Regents' copyright notices from the 1980s,[3]

My software is written BY a pirate (me) FOR other pirates.  If you are
not a pirate, my sw is not for you.

M~

[TUHS] Re: Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[G. Branden Robinson]

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At 2024-01-07T16:20:35-0800, Mychaela Falconia wrote:
> > It was made under Solaris 2.6, on an Ultra 2 ("Pulsar"), using the
> > troff, tbl, eqn, pic, refer and macros as supplied by Sun at that
> > time, and NOT any GNU ones. Why? These were the versions written by
> > AT&T that Sun got directly from them during their SVR4
> > collaboration. I used the PostScript output option to troff (which
> > obviously did not exist in 1979).
> 
> You did the right thing: the version you used certainly feels much
> more "right" than anything from GNU.

This sort of broad, nonspecific, reflexive derogation of groff (or GNU
generally) is unproductive and frequently indicative of ignorance.

Admittedly, groff does not attempt pixel-perfect reproduction of classic
Unix documentation, particularly not C/A/T output.

There's a good reason for that, and one that will challenge your efforts
as well, if you draw your scope as far back as the C/A/T.  (If your
horizon is 4.3BSD documents rendered as PostScript, you may be in luck.)
The problem is fonts.

The C/A/T's fonts did not even exist in the digital domain.  They were
produced from photographic plates.  Their reproduction is consequently
something of a pickle.

The good news is that the Adobe PostScript Times faces and their URW
clone are "pretty close" equivalents.  Close enough that I was able to
reproduce Kernighan & Cherry's "Typesetting Mathematics User's Guide --
Second Edition" (a.k.a. "the eqn manual") with fairly high fidelity.

https://github.com/g-branden-robinson/retypesetting-mathematics

This work required (1) some bug fixes to the GNU ms macros, now applied;
and (2) fine-tuning of the line length and page offset to compensate for
the different metrics of Adobe/URW Times versus the C/A/T's.

There is a third problem, whose resolution is in progress, when
producing PDF output from this document; slanted Greek symbols are
present but "not quite right".  This is because unlike PostScript, PDF
font repertoires generally don't provide a "slanted symbol" face.
gropdf author Deri James has committed some work to groff's Git
repository synthesizing such a face.  We expect it in groff 1.24.

But if you are going for pixel-perfect reproduction of documents that
used fonts you don't have, you're going to need to recreate the fonts
somehow--perfectly (at least for the glyphs that a given document uses).
One of the reasons Knuth was able to be so meticulously perfectionistic
with TeX and avoid regressions at the pixel placement level is because
he developed his own fonts along with just about everything else.  AT&T
troff did not make that choice.

Like AT&T troff, groff attempts to be a practical typesetting system.
One way I measure its success is by the fact that practiced AT&T troff
users like Brian Kernighan[1] and Doug McIlroy[2] use it for the
composition of new works, and speak of it with approval.  (Doug reports
bugs, some of which we manage to address.)

groff is not, primarily, a vehicle for nostalgia trips.

> After almost 20 y of intermittent development (started in the fall of
> 2004), I just made the first official release of my version of troff:
>
> https://www.freecalypso.org/pub/UNIX/components/troff/qjtroff-r1.tar.Z
> https://www.freecalypso.org/pub/UNIX/components/troff/qjtroff-r1.tar.gz

But there is room in the world for such things, particularly if they are
Free Software.  I was unable to determine that qjtroff is, except for a
few portions retaining UC Regents' copyright notices from the 1980s,[3]
and if these contain further original work by you (or others), then the
lack of a clear copyright notice and licensing information renders the
project "all rights reserved", meaning among other things that people
cannot redistribute to others, let alone make modifications--say, to add
the documentation that is not present.

README:
> Documentation: in 2012 I started writing a proper manual, but ran out
> of time (had to switch to other projects).  Because it can easily be
> another year or two or ... before I can get back to that documentation
> and finish it, I decided to release this software as-is, without docs.
> Too many projects, too little time...

In any event, the groff mailing list is the de facto water cooler for
all *roff developers, and I invite you to join it to stay abreast of
developments.  Discussion of non-groff *roffs is rare but welcomed.
Since there is no standard for *roff, it is the most useful forum for
discussion of, for instance, unspecified details of formatter or macro
package behavior.

(Unfortunately, sometimes people ask for help with Heirloom Doctools
troff and receive solutions that are applicable only to groff;
Heirloom's own community seems sadly too shy, or perhaps too attenuated,
to share its expertise.)

Regards,
Branden

[1] https://technicallywewrite.com/2023/06/01/groff
[2] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2023-07/msg00062.html

[3] There were also Adobe copyright notices in AFM files, which are not
    necessarily a problem since font _metrics_ are not copyrightable[4]
    and of course several false positives arising from the existence of
    "copyright" as a named glyph in fonts.

[4] At least not in the United States, and perhaps not in many countries
    of the world that are signatories to the various trade treaties
    (URAA-GATT, TRIPS, and so forth) through which WIPO has exported
    U.S. copyright law to a nearly global scope.  IANAL.  TINLA.

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