[TUHS] formatting 1981 troff today?

[Clem Cole]

On Mon, Jul 21, 2025 at 7:04 AM <arnold at skeeve.com> wrote:

> I will be working on Linux, Ubuntu 24.04.
>
Can't speak for Linux, but the original ditroff kit from AT&T troff
toolchest and the original Adobe transcript just compiled on macOS the last
time I tried.

That said, I have mostly switched to groff as Larry mentioned, but I have a
couple of things that I don't want to introduce artifacts, and when I did
that, I always used the real thing.

One thing to be careful of is that if you are creating PS (or later PDF),
you might want to consider transcript, although later versions of ditroff,
AT&T included dpost(1troff).  Depending when the book was built, the
original AT&T ditroff tables only supported the Meganthaler, the APS5 and
/C/A/T and you needed to purchase Transcript from Adobe to get the psdit()
command and the tables  [At Masscomp to cut down on support at the time, we
ate the binary redistribution for both and just included them both as our
standard troff kit].

Groff added -Tpdf, which is lacking in Transcript, but PS was de rigre in
those days, particularly with Display PostScript, so systems like macOS's
"preview" could open them directly [not so today].   You need Acrobat or a
replacement to convert [again today, I use ps2pdf from Ghostscript, but
again for things that I want as close to the original as possible, I leave
them as -Tps from ditroff and psdit.

Clem
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