[TUHS] troff was not so widely usable

[Rob Pike]

https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/202/index.html

On Thu, Feb 11, 2021 at 6:05 PM Andrew Hume <andrew at humeweb.com> wrote:

> there was actually a weird fuss about the Merganthaler typesetter.
>
> Ken figured out how the fonts were encoded and so we had the raw outline
> data for
> all the fonts (they were gorgeous!). this enabled us to add in special
> characters like
> the peter weinberger face.
>
> ken wanted to do the right thing and tried to license the fonts from
> Merganthaler,
> but we had endless discussions where Ken would say “we know how the fonts
> are encoded,
> can we license them?” and the sales person would say “no you can’t;
> they’re secret”,
> and so on. we’d even show them the peter face but to no avail. so we kinda
> flew
> under the radar for that (but we tried!).
>
> the typesetter itself was entertaining; if i recall correctly, the
> software ran on a 8in floppy
> and Ken wrote a B compiler/run time system for the computer inside.
>
> andrew
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