[TUHS] troff, Gremlin terminals, and the grn preprocessor

[Jonathan Gray]

On Sat, Jul 12, 2025 at 10:01:47PM -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> Hi Jonathan,
> 
> At 2025-07-13T12:45:30+1000, Jonathan Gray wrote:
> > > I'm not sure about that reference to "Berkeley troff".  I already
> > > deleted the modifier "device-independent" from that sentence because
> > > I've never seen even a whisper of evidence that the CSRG ever
> > > distributed Kernighan's device-independent troff; that was locked up
> > > behind AT&T's revenue-seeking aims.
> > 
> > from the Berkeley manual:
> 
> ...which one?  Is the one you're referencing archived at minnie?
> 
> Or do you mean the man page listed below as "grn.1"?

CD4 local/man/man1/grn.1

seems to be the same text as
http://man.bsd.lv/4.4BSD-Lite2/grn.1
(it is not part of 4.4BSD-Lite2)

> 
> > grn - ditroff preprocessor for gremlin files
> > 
> > more on the Berkeley ditroff distribution below
> 
> Indeed!  I knew about vtroff but not about a Berkeley fork of Kernighan
> troff.  This is significant news to me, and adds a whole new branch onto
> the troff family tree in my head.

James Clark referred to it as BSD ditroff and goes on to
comment on how groff didn't use some of the BSD extensions in
a Sep 30, 1991 post to comp.text:
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.text/c/OBd9K9hEPSE/m/adTHd_3O434J

A Dec 12, 1984 post to net.text called it ditroff gremlin:
https://groups.google.com/g/net.text/c/nVeNpNAHxP0/m/Ea2bLUJEnjkJ

John Ousterhout, the UCB contact mentioned, led the research group
that did Sprite.  grn(1) was also included in Sprite.