[TUHS] Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

G. Branden Robinson g.branden.robinson at gmail.com
Sat Jan 20 02:52:19 AEST 2024


Hi Lennart,

At 2024-01-18T15:45:55+0000, Lennart Jablonka wrote:
> Quoth John Gardner:
> > Thanks for reminding me, Branden. :) I've yet to get V7 Unix working with
> > the latest release of SimH, so that's kind of stalled my ability to develop
> > something in K&R-friendly  C.
> 
> I went ahead and write a little C/A/T-to-later-troff-output converter in
> v7-friendly and C89-conforming C:
> 
> https://git.sr.ht/~humm/catdit

This is an exciting prospect but I can't actually see anything there.

I get an error.

"401 Unauthorized

You don't have the necessary permissions to access this page. Index"

> I’m not confident in having got the details of spacing right (Is that
> 55-unit offset when switching font sizes correct?)

I've never heard of this C/A/T feature/wart before.  Huh.

> and the character codes emitted are still those of the C/A/T,
> resulting in the wrong glyphs being used.

The codes should probably be remapped by default, with a command-line
option to restore the original ones.  I would of course recommend
writing out 'C' commands with groff special character names.

> I created the attached document like this:
> 
> 	v7$ troff -t /usr/man/man0/title >title.cat
> 	host$ catdit <title.cat | dpost -F. -Tcat >title.ps
> 
> (Where do the two blank pages at the end come from?)

Good question; we may need to rouse a C/A/T expert.

> PS: Branden, for rougher results, if you happen to have a Tektronix
> 4014 at hand (like the one emulated by XTerm), you can use that to
> look at v7 troff’s output.  Tell your SIMH to pass control bytes
> through and run troff -t | tc.

I'd love to, just please make your repo available to the public.  :)

Regards,
Branden
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