[TUHS] troff was not so widely usable

[Larry McVoy]

The Hershey fonts were what we had, they kinda sucked but you worked 
with them.  I think is a passage, you know those fonts, you were there,
it was not great.  People who haven't been there have no idea how lucky
they are.

On Wed, Feb 10, 2021 at 06:30:31PM -0800, Mary Ann Horton wrote:
> 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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Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm