[TUHS] troff was not so widely usable

Jon Forrest nobozo at gmail.com
Fri Feb 12 03:34:11 AEST 2021



On 2/11/2021 5:06 AM, John Gilmore wrote:

> This reminded me of a project that I and a small team did in the 1980s.
> We were licensees of Sun's NeWS source code, and we wanted our software
> to be able to use the wide variety of fonts sold commercially by Adobe
> and font design companies.  The problem was, they were encoded in Adobe
> Type 1 font definitions, which Adobe considered a proprietary trade
> secret. 
> 
> Our team ended up pulling the ROMs out of an original LaserWriter, and
> writing and improving a 68000 disassembler.  One of our team members
> read the code, figured out which parts handled these fonts, and how it
> decoded them.  He wrote that down in his own words in a plain text
> document, not a program, following the prevailing court decisions about
> how to avoid copyright issues while reverse-engineering a trade secret.
> Ultimately, we released that document to some interested people, so that
> others could implement support for Type 1 fonts.  Shortly afterward,
> Adobe magnanimously decided to "release the specification", as Wikipedia
> says. 

I always thought the Prof. Michael Harrison and his group in the
CS Dept. at UC Berkeley were the first to do this. I found a reference
to this in

https://books.google.com/books?id=IToEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PT7&lpg=PT7&dq=michael++harrison+berkeley+postscript+fonts#v=onepage&q=michael%20%20harrison%20berkeley%20postscript%20fonts&f=false

Plus, Mike told me personally that this is what happened.

Jon


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