[TUHS] [Groff] It is time to modernise "groff"
Jon Steinhart
jon at fourwinds.com
Wed Sep 6 13:35:53 AEST 2017
"Steve Johnson" writes:
> One of the interesting thing that troff lled to in Unix was stderr!
> Initially, Unix had stdin and stdout, but no stderr.
>
> We had a phototypesetter that worked by flashing pictures of the various
> letters on photosensitive paper. It came out in a roll that had to be fed
> into a developer and when it emerged it had to be cut into pages manually.
> Several months after we got the phototypesetter somebody (The Hunt
> brothers?) cornered the market for silver, and the cost of the developer
> shot through the roof. We were asked to cut back on our use of the
> phototypesetter, and we tried to do so.
>
> One day, I was attempting to print out a one-page document. I ran troff
> piped into the phototypesetter and got out my roll of paper and fed it into
> the developer. Out the other end came a page with only one line on it
> (beautifully typeset): "cannot open input file xxx" A number of others
> had similar experiences, and stderr was born...
Ah, the C/A/T. Responsible from some of the squirrelly aspects of troff
like font positions.
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