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

[John Gardner]

Hi Mychaela,

*My feeling is that the task would require hiring a professional typeface
> designer*

I'm a professional graphic designer with access to commercial typeface
authoring software. Send me the highest-quality and most comprehensive
scans of a C/A/T-printed document, and I'll get to work.

*John Gardner wrote yet another [cat2dit] but it's in JavaScript so not
> maximally convenient for a Unix command line grognard.*

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'm still up for this, assuming you've not already started. The JavaScript
utility was just a Q&D script added to an already rushed project (Roff.js),
and I"m certainly not counting on it being palatable to anybody.

— John


On Tue, 9 Jan 2024 at 00:08, Mychaela Falconia <falcon@freecalypso.org>
wrote:

> G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > This sort of broad, nonspecific, reflexive derogation of groff (or GNU
> > generally) is unproductive and frequently indicative of ignorance.
>
> I don't have enough spoons to engage in political fights any more, so
> I'll just focus on technical aspects.
>
> > The C/A/T's fonts did not even exist in the digital domain.  They were
> > produced from photographic plates.  Their reproduction is consequently
> > something of a pickle.
>
> I am very keenly aware of this fact!
>
> > But if you are going for pixel-perfect reproduction of documents that
> > used fonts you don't have, you're going to need to recreate the fonts
> > somehow--perfectly (at least for the glyphs that a given document uses).
>
> The problem you are describing is one which I am *not* actively working
> on presently.  I am _contemplating_ this problem, but not actively
> working on it.  In my current stage of 4.3BSD document set reprinting,
> I am willing to accept that hyphenations, line breaks and page breaks
> will be different from the original because of slightly different font
> metrics, and accept the use of only fi and fl ligatures (in running
> text, outside of explicit demonstrations) because Adobe's version
> dropped ff, ffi and ffl.  (In places where original troff docs
> explicitly demonstrate the use of all 5 ligatures, I have a hack that
> pulls the missing ligs from a different, not-really-matching font.)
>
> I am willing to accept this imperfection because it is fundamentally
> no different from what UCB/Usenix themselves did in 1986: they took
> Bell Labs docs that were originally written for CAT and troffed them
> on their APS-5 ditroff setup - but those two typesetters also had
> slight diffs in their font metrics, causing line and page breaks to
> move around!
>
> OTOH I am very willing to entertain, as an intellectual exercise, what
> would it take to produce a new font set that would *truly* replicate
> the CAT font set at Bell Labs.  The spacing widths of the original
> fonts (the key determinant of where breaks will land) are known, right
> here:
>
> https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/troff/tab3.c
>
> Back in 2004 in one afternoon I threw together a quick-hack program
> that takes the output of original troff (CAT binary codes) and prints
> it in PostScript, using standard Adobe fonts.  The character
> positioning is that of original troff, but because the actual font
> characters don't perfectly match these metrics, the result is not
> pretty - but the non-pretty result does show *exactly* where every
> line and page break lands per original intent!
>
> So what would it take to do such a re-creation properly?  My feeling
> is that the task would require hiring a professional typeface designer
> to produce a modified version of Times font family: modify the fonts
> to produce good visual results (change actual characters as needed) to
> fit the prescribed, unchangeable metrics as in spacing widths.  And
> design all 5 f-ligatures while at it.
>
> I have no slightest idea how much it would cost to hire a professional
> typeface designer to do what I just described, hence I have no idea
> whether or not it is something that the hobbyist community could
> potentially afford, even collectively.  But it is an interesting idea
> to ponder nonetheless - which is where I leave it for now.
>
> > There is a third problem, whose resolution is in progress, when
> > producing PDF output from this document; slanted Greek symbols are
> > present but "not quite right".  This is because unlike PostScript, PDF
> > font repertoires generally don't provide a "slanted symbol" face.
>
> Can you please elaborate?  I personally hate PDF with a passion, but I
> concede that in order to make my documents readable by people other
> than me, I have to rcp my .ps file from the 4.3BSD machine to a
> semi-modern-ish (Slackware) Linux box and run ps2pdf on the file.
> But what "slanted symbol" font are you talking about that exists in
> PostScript but not in PDF?  The only PostScript fonts whose existence
> I take as a given (as opposed to downloading the font explicitly) are
> the standard 14: 4 Times family fonts, 4 Helvetica family fonts, 4
> Courier family fonts, Symbol and ZapfDingbats.  Which of these 14 is
> missing in PDF, and how does "standard" ps2pdf (Ghostscript) handle it?
>
> > Like AT&T troff, groff attempts to be a practical typesetting system.
>
> I wrote *my* version of troff with exact same goals, and I've been
> using it as my personal everyday TPS report formatter for the past 20 y.
> It's just that for deeply personal reasons which I would rather not go
> into on this list, I chose to develop my own tool instead of using one
> that bears GNU branding.  I also wanted my troff to run under 4.3BSD,
> using only K&R C, which I reason would probably be impossible with
> groff.  (I recall reading somewhere that groff is written in C++ - so
> it is completely out of consideration for something that needs to run
> under 4.3BSD.)
>
> > But there is room in the world for such things, particularly if they are
> > Free Software.  I was unable to determine that qjtroff is, except for a
> > few portions retaining UC Regents' copyright notices from the 1980s,[3]
>
> My software is written BY a pirate (me) FOR other pirates.  If you are
> not a pirate, my sw is not for you.
>
> M~
>
>