[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

Noel Hunt noel.hunt at gmail.com
Wed May 16 09:12:22 AEST 2018


I have built ideal several times over the years. I have
only tested it on the samples in the manual, in particular
the diagram Brian Kernighan used for the 'cbt' documentation.
I believe there was one bug, which was found by John Mackin
at Sydney University many years ago so the code I have has
that documented, well, patched.


On Wed, May 16, 2018 at 9:05 AM, Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:

> > I still find pic really useful ...  > I don't know of any other tool
> that lets you do drawings like that
>
> Unix had "ideal", a remarkable language by Chris Van Wyk, based on complex
> numbers and capable of some constraint solving. Its code seemed to be
> lost but can now be found in one of the online v10 repositories. I've
> been meaning to try to resurrect it. If anyone has already done so,
> I'd love to hear about it.
>
> I, too, have some pic macros, though no big coherent packages, to do
> things like  polar coordinates and solving for the intersection of lines
> and circles. I have even in extremis made filled triangles with scripts
> that massage PostScript by deleting corners of filled rectangles. Then
> from triangles you can, with patience, make polygons.
>
> Doug
>
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