[TUHS] The Fourth Research Edition Unix Programmer's Manual

Diomidis Spinellis dds at aueb.gr
Sun Nov 19 22:43:23 AEST 2017


I don't think we had the Fourth Research Edition Unix Programmer's 
Manual available in typeset form.  I played a bit with the troff manual 
pages on TUHS and managed to typeset it into PDF.  You can find the PDF 
document at https://dspinellis.github.io/unix-v4man/v4man.pdf.

I modernized the old shell scripts and corrected some minor markup 
glitches through commits that are recorded on a GitHub repository: 
https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-v4man.  The process was surprisingly 
smooth.  The scripts for generating the table of contents and the 
permuted index are based on the original ones.  The few problems I 
encountered in the troff source had to do with missing spaces after 
requests, the ^F hyphenation character causing groff to complain, a 
failure of groff to honor .li requests followed by a line starting with 
a ., and two uses of a lowercase letter for specifying a font.  I wrote 
from scratch a script to typeset everything into one volume.  I could 
not find a shell script for typesetting the whole manual in any of the 
Research Editions.  I assume the process of running the typesetter was 
so cumbersome, error prone, and time-consuming that it was manually 
performed on a page-by-page basis.  Correct me if I'm wrong here.

Diomidis Spinellis



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