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

G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson(a)gmail.com> wrote: Not just "nowadays": font metrics has always been the standard term, including original troff days. But I specifically said "spacing widths" because it is the _only_ metric that matters for the purpose of pleasing otroff and keeping all line and page breaks where they were originally. All other metrics matter not in the "pleasing otroff" category, but in the category of "visual beauty" or "recreating exact appearance", which would be next-level-up from simply satisfying otroff. Yes, this difference exists. However, let me point out that *both* official troff-to-PS toolchains that existed in traditional UNIX world (Adobe TranScript is one and Bell Labs DWB is the other) took the path of accepting non-slanted Greek letters as-is from Symbol. Seeing that Bell Labs themselves deemed this change as acceptable tells me that the slanted nature of lowercase Greek letters in original typesetter fonts (C/A/T, APS-5) was not considered an absolutely essential feature of these characters that MUST be preserved in every new troff implementation. OK, fair enough: your lineage made a different choice in this regard. But seeing that both Adobe TranScript and Bell Labs' own later troff took the same approach as I took in my troff (using Symbol as-is), I don't feel guilty about not doing the same SS manipulation you do in groff. There is also a historical/timeline factor for me: A.D. 2010 was the first time I laid my eyes on the output of a traditional pre-PostScript troff typesetter (that was when I scored a physical copy of 4.3BSD books), and by that point I had been using my own troff for 6 y since 2004. Yes, I wrote it blindly at first: because of my younger age, I didn't get to live through the era of traditional typesetters, I totally missed it, but I needed a working troff under my then-production OS (4.3BSD) - so what was I supposed to do?... M~