[TUHS] Troff to ps

[Jaap Akkerhuis]

> On Jul 27, 2020, at 1:37, Norman Wilson <norman at oclsc.org> wrote:
> 
> Nemu Nusquam:
> 
>  When was dpost born?
> 
> =====
> 
> CSTR 97, A Typesetter-Independent TROFF by Brian W Kernighan
> was issued in 1981 and revised the next year.  So that's the
> earliest possible date.

But that was before postscript, that was for the new typesetter.

> I vaguely remember the existence of Postscript support in
> general, including at least one Apple Laserwriter kicking
> around somewhere, starting at some point during my time at
> 1127 in the latter 1980s.

First there was the Canon (LP 10 I believe) and postscript came later.

SoftQuad licensed the DWB quite early in the process.

> It's a scanned-image PDF so I can't search it by
> machine, but it includes such things as listings of
> the source-code directory and manifests of various
> binary distributions, and dpost doesn't appear anywhere
> I can see.  As the URL implies, the docs seem to
> be dated 1989.  So maybe dpost wasn't part of the
> product until DWB 3.0; but maybe we in Research got
> an early copy of the postscript stuff (I think bwk
> was in regular communication with the USG-troff
> folks), perhaps in 1989.

There was quite some communication between Peter Nilson (npn, known
for picasso) and bwk.  I myself ended up working on the last DWB
(3.4.1).

	jaap


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