[TUHS] troff was not so widely usable

[Mary Ann Horton]

We had vtroff at Berkeley around 1980, on the big Versatec wet plotter, 
4 pages wide. We got really good at cutting up the pages on the output.

It used the Hershey font. It was horrible. Mangled somehow, lots of 
parts of glyphs missing. I called it the "Horse Shit" font.

I took it as my mission to clean it up. I wrote "fed" to edit it, dot by 
dot, on the graphical HP 2648 terminal at Berkeley. I got all the fonts 
reasonably cleaned up, but it was laborious.

I still hated Hershey. It was my dream to get real C/A/T output at the 
largest 36 point size, and scan it in to create a decent set of Times 
fonts. I finally got the C/A/T output years later at Bell Labs, but 
there were no scanners available to me at the time. Then True Type came 
along and it was moot.

I did stumble onto one nice rendition of Times Roman in one point size, 
from Stanford, I think. I used it to write banner(6).

On 2/10/21 5:53 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
> Ron. That’s awesome.  Ferrin used the Same set of Hersey Font that the 
> XGP used.  He got them from Stanford as I recall but they were 
> publically (aka open source)
>
> On Wed, Feb 10, 2021 at 7:28 PM Ron Natalie <ron at ronnatalie.com 
> <mailto:ron at ronnatalie.com>> wrote:
>
>     We used nroff quite a bit with both the Model37 teletype (for
>     which it
>     wsa designed, ours even had the greek box on it) and with output
>     filters
>     for the lineprinter and the Diablos.
>
>     Later on we drove troff into cat emulators that used Versatec
>     printers.
>         I don’t knwo wher Berkely’s vcat got their fonts, but the JHU
>     verset
>     had an amusing history on that.
>
>     George Toth went down to the NRL which had a real CAT and printed out
>     the fonts in large point size on film.    In the basement of the
>     biophysics bulding was a scanning transmission electron microscope
>     which
>     used a PDP-11/20 as its controller and an older (512x512 or so)
>     framebuffer.    George took the scanning wires off the microsope nad
>     hooked them up to the X and Y of a tektronics oscilliscope.   Then he
>     put a photomutlipler tube in a scope camera housing and hoked the
>     sense
>     wire from the microscope to that.
>
>     He now had the worlds most expensive flying spot scanner.  He’d tape
>     one letter at a time to the scope and then bring up the microscope
>     sofware (DOS/BATCH I think) and tell it to run the microscope.   
>     Then
>     without powering down the memory in the framebuffer, he’d boot up
>     miniunix and copy the stuff from the framebuffer to an RX05 pack.
>     After months of laboriously scanning he was able to write the CAT
>     emulator.
>
>     I had gone to work for Martin Marietta wirking on a classified
>     project
>     so I wrote hacks to the -mm macro package to handle security markings
>     (automatically putting the highest on each page on thte top and
>     bottom).
>         Later when ditroff became available I continued to use it with
>     various laserprinters.    I even wrote macropackages to emulate IBM’s
>     doc style when we were contracting with them.
>
>     This was all to the chagrin of my boss who wanted us to switch to
>     Framemaker.
>
>
>
> -- 
> Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual
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