[TUHS] troff was not so widely usable (was: The UNIX Command Language (1976))

[John Cowan]

On Thu, Feb 11, 2021 at 11:56 AM Ron Natalie <ron at ronnatalie.com> wrote:


> It's important to know the difference between a font and a typeface.    A
> typeface isn't protectable.  That's the representation of the actual
> letters on the printed page (or screen in our case).     George was free to
> scan the output of the phototypesetter.
>

Or to make use of bitmap fonts, which are exact representations of the
typeface, at least in the U.S.  (In Europe there are design patents that
make typefaces protectable.)  See section 1.12 of <
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/fonts-faq/part2/> for the relevant quotations from
the Code of Federal Regulations.

Some time ago, I was hacking on the program FIGlet, which is a
bells-and-whistles banner program: you write FIGfonts as plain text files
with N lines per big character, where N is the font height measured in
small characters.  It is capable of kerning big characters nicely by using
a chosen small character to represent a "squishable space".

My main two improvements were to extend the font format to represent up to
2^31 big characters and to accept mapping tables to convert input from a
specific encoding to font indices.  (I ended up writing a comprehensive
decoder for arbitrary ISO 2022 text, possibly the only one that has ever
existed.)

In addition, I wrote a program to convert X BDS (bitmap) fonts to FIGfonts,
and packaged the standard BDS fonts with the standard FIGlet library.  That
served me well later when I was working for the Associated Press.  My boss
told me that the New York Daily News, which was downstairs in the same
building, was tired of paying Reuters for a program running on a PC that
fetched the current headlines from Reuters and displayed them on a huge
news ticker mounted on several sides of the newsroom, which was the size of
a NY city block.  Because the AP is a not-for-profit collective, once you
buy in, all the services are free.

The Reuters program was a Windows binary, and the manual they had for the
ticker turned out to be for a different model altogether.  I called the
manufacturer and got the correct manual (it took several days).  I wrote a
program in Perl that would fetch an AP headline feed (in RSS) which I was
responsible for, load up the X FIGfont specified as a command-line
argument, and send the text to the ticker, a matter of writing a single
column of bits and then the next and then the next, as the hardware took
care of the actual horizontal scrolling for me.

Once I had it running, I walked around to various people in the newsroom
who didn't look too busy, and asked them what they thought?  The general
response was a weak "LGTM", until I got to one guy who said, "No, it
doesn't look quite right."

"If you'll follow me," I said, "I'll see what I can do."  He and the guy in
the next cube followed me to the desk where the PC sat.  I killed the
program and started it up with the name of a different font.  "Mmm, not
quite."

We went through a number of fonts until I got "Yes!  Now _that_ looks like
a real newsroom font!"  He asked the other guy, "Do you agree?"

"Yes, that's great!"

So they were happy and I was happy and when I got back to AP my boss was
happy.  Only later did I find out that my two guys were the city editor and
the managing editor of the Daily News!

Standard troff voodoo, just put a power of two backslashes in front of it
> until it works and if you still have problems add a \c.
>

See "The Telnet Song" at <https://www.glaver.org/ftp/humor/telnet-song.txt>.
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