Re: [Groff] Blast from the past

[Larry Kollar]

> Steffen Nurpmeso <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> Heinz-Jürgen Oertel <address@hidden> wrote:
> |Am Montag, 9. Februar 2015, 16:19:51 schrieb Peter Schaffter:
> |> Groffers --
> |> 
> |> I don't see any mention of this in the list archives, and it's too
> |> wonderful to miss.  If you want a glimpse of days gone by, have a
> |> look at
> |> 
> |>   http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/751318.pdf
> |
> |I like this statement:
> |"ROFF is a computer program which produces esthetically pleasing \
> |manuscripts from punched card source texts." 
> 
> ..and i hoped that it wasn't used for producing the document in
> question, seldom have i seen such huge gaps in between words, it's
> almost unreadable (in fact i gave up after a few pages)!

Ye olde line printers didn’t have niceties like non-fixed width fonts or
even proportional spacing. For pretty documents, they were still setting
type by hand back then. :-)

The spacing comment reminds me of when I was using nroff in 1983.
We had a NEC daisy-wheel printer that could do arbitrary motions,
at least horizontally. I cobbled an nroff “driver” (a compiled struct, IIRC)
to even out the word spacing. Still Courier, though. We had a Times-like
wheel, and I had made a start on a driver for it when the job dried up.
I probably would have had some issues with underlining.

— Larry