below.... [excellent job -- you wrote what I had planned -- few tweeks/color added below]. On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 10:31 PM Win Treese <treese(a)acm.org> wrote: Fun fact, I believe that bwk was Brian's thesis committee It was even more important than that. Brian Reid observed that *most documents* looked like their brethren. For instance, the Unix doc looks like BTL TM format. Each university tends to have a 'style' for their thesis [-me 'knows' how to generate UCB thesis format]. Office correspondence (letters, memo for file) have a certain look. So he wants to separate the description of the output (*i.e.* a template) for a document and not make the person that did want (need too) think about the output, just do their thing (as you said -- let writer's write). There is a long (and somewhat nasty history history here). Mike Shamus was a one-time CMU CS prof. He created Unilogic and arranged for the IP to be transferred to him. They had a transpiler that converted 'compatible BLISS' (*a.k.a*. Vax Bliss) to other languages. I believe that a flavor of Pascal, Ada and C were possible outputs. I'm not sure of the provenance of the transpiler. Contemporary with Scribe was the PQCC project - Product Quality Compiler Compiler, that Wulf and his students were working. That work forked Tartan labs around the same time as Unilogic and I know transpilers had been part of the original work, but I never closed the loop. To be honest they had to have been related in some manner, but that all happened after I had left. At that point, Scribe had been converted from the original PDP-10 version to compatible BLISS on VAX/VMS. Unilogic sold versions of Scribe for TOPS, Vax both VMS and Unix, Sun, Apollo and I believe a number of other systems (maybe HP and AIX). The sad part is that history seems to have lost both Scribe and the associated transpiler (if anyone knows otherwise, I'd love to hear something). +1 and for many documents (like business letters), I always found Scribe easier - but maybe that's because I grew up the idea of an editor and *document compiler* (roff and friends).. Amen In real publishing, the division still exists: lots of To give ex-CMU and UCB grad, Ken Keller credit. He tried to bridge that with his FrameMaker program (which I think Adobe still owns - I have not seen much about it in few years and have lost track of Keller). IIRC Ken's program could take a Scribe/LaTex style sheets also. But FrameMaker (like Scribe) was expensive and originally required a UNIX box with 32-bit linear addressing to compile, so it was fairly late to the PC. I never really learned it although Ken gave me a copy early on to play with. IIRC our doc folks at Stellar used it (whereas the Masscomp/ORA folks of the time were strictly roff as previously discussed). Indeed - that is what I have been told. I am under the impression that early on when Brian started as a Stanford Prof, he had difficulty getting a use license from Unilogic even though he was the original author. That churn supposedly somehow influenced Leslie WRT to the creation of LaTex to make Tex more accessible. +1 FWIW I was back at CMU a couple of winters ago for the annual 'Build-18' maker event. I was chatting with some folks about a few of the cool things we had worked on in the 70's and which ones had lasted, like the PQCC, the speech recognition work, Mach, Andrew *et al*. At that time, I was told then that there was a linux x86 binary for Scribe still floating around and some people still used it for some specific documents. I asked if I could get a copy to play with and they told me they would try to find it, but that was right before Covidtide. It's been crickets since I inquired. I'll see if I can find out more.

On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 10:08 AM John P. Linderman <jpl.jpl(a)gmail.com> wrote: I think that is true for any scheme -- professionals and editors need to work together. That's what Jon was suggesting. When they don't have shared vocabulary/goals - bad things can happen. FWIW: I can not speak for him directly as I never had this conversation with him (Win might have), but from what I knew/know of Brian Ried I think he might agree with what I'm suggesting. IMO, *there will always be cases like the one that you described*. This is not particular to any document compiler system. The question is how to bring the two sides together and who has the high order bit? My complaint with Word and the like, is that the 'control' is hidden. It's $%^& magic -- why is it indenting here? Hey I did not tell it to make it go italics ... Like Jon and Larry, I'm a big roff fan and still use it. But to give Brian his due, his style sheets were in ASCII and what was happening on the page was fairly easy to deduce. That said, I never used Scribe for anything large (like a book), which I can say I have done with troff. In the late 1970s, I did use Scribe for some papers and found it quite easy to use. Since that time, as a co-author I've also tried the same with LaTex and/or Word and found both difficult. When I have the lead and if I can, I'll use troff -ms with a few extra Masscomp macros (that ORA used to pass on too -- the Steve Talbot extensions for lists in particular). So from my professional experience, it has been mostly with troff, my use of Scribe was short lived. I'm pretty sure tht Keller tried to make creating books easier in FrameMaker, as that was one of his target users. But again I only played with it, never really had to rely on it for anything.

Clem Cole [13/01/2022 17.06]: That's the main reason I used WordPerfect instead, when I had to deliver my work in Microsoft Word format (about 1990-2000). WordPerfect has a "reveal codes" command, which makes it possible to see why the text suddenly is in italics... And it could/can save in Word format, which my editors demanded. -- Hilsen Harald

On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 9:57 AM Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote: I understand that Stallman was deeply affected by both the closed nature of and "time bombs" in Scribe. Does anyone have any experience with Interleaf? That was another in the lineage of document processors that seems to have fallen into history. But one could argue that Scribe sort of exists in a way, in LaTeX. My Texinfo was supposedly developed as an alternative to Scribe specifically; I know Arnold has said he really likes it for writing books. I wonder what the connection between texinfo and latex is, if any at all. To bring it back to Unix, troff et al are obvious examples of the Unix philosophy applied to document preparation, while TeX and its progeny have always felt very foreign to me. They work, of course, but in a way that feels discordant with respect to the aesthetic of the system. Of course, TeX originated on the SAIL system, so that makes sense: the PDP-10 world had different sensibilities than the Unix world. One wonders whether, if Knuth had been working on a Unix machine instead of SAIL, whether TeX would have been as chatty as it is; I suspect not. - Dan C.

On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 11:03 AM Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote: That was always my impression. Stallman hated troff (and man) because it was not integrated into EMACS (his operating system). I always got the impression that texinfo was more of a shot against man pages and trying to push the purity of the 'ITS-way' to Unix. And of course the problem became the more he did that, the less use texinfo became except for anyone that followed his gospel. As Unix became the mainstream, it meant information for any gnu tools was (is) disjoint. If rms had been willing to just accept the man command itself, I suspect that would not have been. To be fair, its not an unusual behavior. Folks coming from VMS (or windows) try to make Unix look like that. And what did we do with VMS, we added the cshell and Unix tools so people like me could type on it. I'm currently being driven nuts by the simh tool which has a very TOPS/VMS style feel. Everything is help commands. The documents are quite sparse. To me the documents/book (or man pages) should primarily ' go to' and if you want something like 'help' then create it from the documents. But I can not really complain. It's a wonderful tool and its author comes from that heritage not Unix. The problem I remind him is that he will get silly questions from people like me, because we can not find things in his help system - its just not how a Unix program tends to work [I want to look in the index of the document, and find the section myself].

Clem Cole wrote: ITS had a hypertext documentation system, so my assumtion would be that RMS wanted to bring along that to the GNU vision. I don't see that's it would be abount purity, whatever that would mean for documentation.

On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 11:52 AM Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote: Amen bro ... Amen

On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 11:03 AM Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote: Oh sure, but I didn't mean in the sense of code, but rather, philosophically and design-wise. Both seem to be influenced by Scribe's idea of separation of content and presentation (an idea reinvented a decade later in HTML+CSS). LaTeX predates texinfo by some time (I've not looked it up, but I There's some documentation available for both: https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/html_node/History.html Paraphrasing that document, MIT had a thing called Bolio which evolved into BoTeX. Independently, Stallman created the "info" format (for ITS perhaps?) and then BoTeX and Info merged to become texinfo, with the stated goal of producing both online and printed representations from a single source document. The earliest texinfo formatter was written in Emacs Lisp. BoTeX seems to date from late 1984, but this doesn't put a date on the creation of texinfo. It _does_ mention `makeinfo` in "the early 90s", so we may assume sometime after 1984 and before 1992? `texinfo.el` from the Emacs 18.29 distribution has copyright dates from 1985, 1988, but it's hard to make out the actual provenance of the source in those files (ie, was the 1985 date due to that file being copied from an earlier file created in 1985?). It's somewhat harder to nail down the exact history of LaTeX; Lamport has this: http://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/pubs.html#latex which seems to indicate that, while "LaTeX: A Document Preparation System" was published in 1986, he had been working on it for at least two or three years before that. https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/lamport-latex-interview.pdf mentions that he started using TeX ca 1979, but doesn't mention when he actually created LaTeX. He goes on to say that he was using a macro package by Max Diaz and thought he could do better "when Don was creating TeX80(?)". I'd guess that means this is in the 1980-81 timeframe? It goes on to say that he moved to DEC in 1985 and never used *roff (I assume he at least poked at it and take that to mean he was never a serious user). It was always my impression that texinfo came more from the ITS info file Info definitely came from that world. Texinfo as the marriage of BoTeX as a Scribe-a-like and Info as an online help format seem less like a hack and more deliberate. Which part was weird? The HP terminals? It's quite TOPS-20-y in a lot of what it does. That seemed perfectly Or at least SAIL-y, but it seems like the PDP-10 systems had a lot of cross-pollination between them, possibly due to the shared lineage from the PDP-6 monitor and associated DEC tools like DDT? - Dan C.

On 1/13/22 1:16 PM, Dan Cross wrote: Brian Fox wrote the original version of GNU `info' and the first standalone C version of `makeinfo' in 1987, right after he started working for the FSF. (makeinfo has since evolved into a perl script.) -- ``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU chet(a)case.edu http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/

<…> I used FrameMaker for a while in the early 90’s, (on MIPS Ultrix 4.4, DEC OSF/1 3.2/Digital Unix 4.0/Tru64 5.1, and Solaris 8/9). It was absolutely targeted at professional document production (vs. word processing), and had a good separation between templates (with all the styling and layout) and documents (which added the content). It was also good at merging multiple documents into a book and applying consistent style across the collection. I think the versions I used were still produced by Frame Technology(?) — before it was bought by Adobe anyway. Ironically, around that same time, Word for Windows 2.0 was IMHO the peak of that product’s functionality, in that while it allowed the user to randomly apply styling to the text, it was the last version that made the template facilities an equal first-class citizen in the UI. It was almost as easy to define and use “semantic” styles for formatting as it was to just do inline markup. Version 6 (they went from 2 to 6 in one hop) bent the product firmly towards use by amateurs, with toolbar buttons for bulleted lists, etc, that hid the underlying use of styles, and thus avoided users incrementally learning how to do consistent documents. From my perspective, every release since has made it worse. More recently, I’ve used DocBook for producing manuals, etc. It’s an awful source format, but has the usual advantages of being plain text, generating useful textual diffs, etc. Cobbling together a production process using DocBook, XSLT, and FOP to emit decent PDF is not for the faint-hearted, and (to circle back to relevance) I always end up questioning whether it’d just be better to use *roff or (La)TeX with a suitable macro package instead. d

On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 10:32 PM Theodore Ts'o &lt;tytso(a)mit.edu&gt; wrote: I hate to be the one who says this, but when it comes to typesetting non-trivial mathematics, there is no competition: LaTeX beats eqn hands down. eqn is fine up to a point (and the neqn thing is kinda nifty for simple things on the terminal; you can kinda sorta get a rendered sigma for a summation, for example) but it breaks down pretty quickly. - Dan C.