[TUHS] Troff to ps

Clem Cole clemc at ccc.com
Mon Jul 27 04:03:49 AEST 2020


I wonder if it used troff or ditroff and then what it used for the ps
engine (probably Ghostscript) and if ditroff, from where the font metric
tables came?  I also wonder what it was using for cat4 to ps conversion
again like Ghostscript.  Like most folks in those days (even most
Universities) since Transcript was reasonably inexpensive, most people
bought it after they got their first PS based printer, particularly if they
had chosen to upgrade to ditroff.    For Masscomp (one advantage of being a
$10K-$50K machine not a $4K one), I did manage to convince management to
buy ditroff and transcript and buy the distribution license for both.  It
increased our price by less than $100 but we justified it that we really
did not want to have to support the original troff and the price to AT&T
and Adobe was just cost of doing business and cheaper for us from a cost of
maintenance standpoint.   We then just bundled ditroff/transcript on every
machine.  Funny, Sun charged for both, it was fairly cheap - I want to say
$500 a node (Larry may remember).   But you had to buy it from
Sun ala-cart.   Many (most) universities did not because they already had
the sources for their Vaxen, so then tended to recompile and move it.

At Stellar we used Sun's as the 'porting base' - since we had to buy AT&T
redistributions licenses anyway, we didn't pay the Sun per node tax.

On Sun, Jul 26, 2020 at 1:11 PM <arnold at skeeve.com> wrote:

> There was a different psroff posted to comp.sources.unix volume 20;
> that's what I was referring to.
>
> Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
>
> > psroff was part of the Transcript FWIW.  It was the moral equi to the UCB
> > command vtroff which did the call to troff -t ... | vcat
> >
> > BTW: I just peeked,  on Disk 4  of Kirk's archives are the source to both
> > ditroff and Adobe's transcript in the 'local' directory.
> >
> > I would suggest starting with transcript, copying to your system and
> typing
> > 'make'
> > That will allow the BSD troff stuff to 'just work' us
> pscat/psroff/enscript
> > et al.
> >
> > This is how most sites that did not spring for a ditroff license worked
> > with their Apple Laserwriters or later PS printers.
> >
> > Then if you want to do the same thing with ditroff, that should 'just
> > compile' and build and you replace troff with ditroff.
> >
> > On Sun, Jul 26, 2020 at 11:38 AM <arnold at skeeve.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Some web searching turns up something called 'psroff' from the late 80s
> > > or so that will convert C/A/T to postscript. Google 'psroff source' and
> > > you should find something you can use.
> > >
> > > Arnold
> > >
> > > arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
> > >
> > > > Will Senn <will.senn at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > My questions:
> > > > > 1. Is there a troff to postcript conversion utility present in a
> stock
> > > > > 2.11 system (or even patch level 4xx system)?
> > > >
> > > > Troff from that era was designed to drive the C/A/T phototypesetter.
> > > > There were tools that converted from C/A/T to postscript but they
> > > > were mostly commercial IIRC.
> > > >
> > > > > 2. Is there a way to build postscript directly on the system?
> > > >
> > > > Likely not.
> > > >
> > > > > 3. Is there an alternative modern way to get to ps or pdf output
> from
> > > > > the nroff/troff that 2.11 has?
> > > >
> > > > I would recommend tar-ing up the doc and macros, moving them to Linux
> > > > or other modern system, and using groff -C to create postscript/pdf.
> > > > That really will be the fastest way.
> > > >
> > > > Arnold
> > >
>
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