Ouch....well I'm glad I shared then, I had no idea someone had already done this....well good to know, I guess I can move on to the CB and MERT manuals then. - Matt G. ------- Original Message ------- On Wednesday, March 8th, 2023 at 2:02 AM, Angelo Papenhoff <aap(a)papnet.eu> wrote: > I've done this a couple of years ago: > http://squoze.net/UNIX > > Cheers, > Angelo > > On 08/03/23, segaloco via TUHS wrote: > > > So I decided to keep the momentum and have just finished the first pass of a Fifth Edition manual restoration based on the same process I used for 3B20 4.1: > > > > https://gitlab.com/segaloco/v5man > > > > There were a few pages missing from the extant PDF scan, at least as far as pages that were in both V4 and V6 sources, so those are handled by seeing how V5 source of the few programs compares to V6. I'll note which pages required this in a second pass. > > > > I've set my sights on V1 and V2 next, using V3's extant roff sources as a starting point, so more to come. > > > > - Matt G.

Hi Angelo, G. Branden Robinson, (CCed on this email) attempted a somewhat similar mission, re-typesetting the paper "Typesetting Mathematics by Kernighan and Cherry" with groff. If you look through the email thread detailing the result [1], you can see notes about aesthetic regressions from the original troff document, and Branden's attempts to fix them. Hope you don't mind me summoning you, Branden :). [1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2022-07/msg00000.html Additionally (though unrelated to roff), the Computerphile youtube channel has a video [2] you may find interesting titled "Recreating Dennis Ritchie's PhD Thesis", in which they discuss how they went about making a faithful recreation of dmr's unsubmitted PhD thesis. [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82TxNejKsng Hope this generates some interesting discussion? :) Josh On Wed, Mar 8, 2023 at 11:30 AM Angelo Papenhoff aap(a)papnet.eu wrote: > Something I'd like is to recreate the original troff output exactly. I > used troff from plan 9 (so same lineage as original troff) but something > causes the output to not look exactly like the original. I don't > remember what it is exactly but you can easily check by comparing my > pdfs with the scan. Line lengths, page length, something like that. > > I don't know if this is just a troff setting or if troff had changed > enough to cause this difference. Unfortunately the original troff is > lost so no way to compare. v7 (or PWB?) is the earliest version of troff > that's still around. And even then one would need CAT emulation, which I > haven't bothered with yet. > > Cheers, > Angelo > > On 08/03/23, segaloco wrote: > > > Ouch....well I'm glad I shared then, I had no idea someone had already done this....well good to know, I guess I can move on to the CB and MERT manuals then. > > > > - Matt G. > > > > ------- Original Message ------- > > On Wednesday, March 8th, 2023 at 2:02 AM, Angelo Papenhoff aap(a)papnet.eu wrote: > > > > > I've done this a couple of years ago: > > > http://squoze.net/UNIX > > > > > > Cheers, > > > Angelo > > > > > > On 08/03/23, segaloco via TUHS wrote: > > > > > > > So I decided to keep the momentum and have just finished the first pass of a Fifth Edition manual restoration based on the same process I used for 3B20 4.1: > > > > > > > > https://gitlab.com/segaloco/v5man > > > > > > > > There were a few pages missing from the extant PDF scan, at least as far as pages that were in both V4 and V6 sources, so those are handled by seeing how V5 source of the few programs compares to V6. I'll note which pages required this in a second pass. > > > > > > > > I've set my sights on V1 and V2 next, using V3's extant roff sources as a starting point, so more to come. > > > > > > > > - Matt G.

That sounds like a fun project — is there really no such beast already?

As far as I know, Tom Ferrin wrote the original in the late 1970s - it is on the original UCSF tape as part of his UNIX graphics tools. That said, Joy may have passed it along on the BSD tapes also. It's called "vcat" and converts Wang C/A/T codes to plotter strokes on a smaller (11/12in wide IIRC) Varian (originally) and small Versatec [wet / kerosene style] plotter using the 200 bpi Hershey fonts that the CMU/MIT/Stanford XGP had used. IIRC, UCB had a large format Versatec (36"/48") and the UCB version could do N pages at a time. In the Adobe 'transcript' package is a similar program (based on Tom work) but outputs using Adobe Fonts. It might take some searching "foo" to find them, but Tom's program is what most of us used back in the day before the Imagen and later Apple LaserWriter - particularly after having had access to an XGP or a Xerox Dover in college ;-) ᐧ On Wed, Mar 8, 2023 at 6:10 PM David Arnold <davida(a)pobox.com> wrote: > > On 9 Mar 2023, at 03:30, Angelo Papenhoff <aap(a)papnet.eu> wrote: > > … > > > And even then one would need CAT emulation, which I > > haven't bothered with yet. > > That sounds like a fun project — is there really no such beast already? > > > > > d > >

Years later I finally asked Joy about it, and his unapologetic answer was

On Fri, 10 Mar 2023, Rob Pike wrote: it. Do you recall the name of this software or project? I tried various greps in a few of the Usenix archives but cannot tell what it is. Thanks

Years later, bless him, Henry Spencer said something on Usenet explaining why the "Berkeley typesetting software" was missing the names of those who created it. He was in the lab that weekend and saw it happen. -rob