7 Jan
2024
7 Jan
'24
8:54 a.m.
Mychaela Falconia wrote:
My hypothesis still stands: until someone convinces me
otherwise, I
shall continue to believe that *every* paper that made its way into V7
Volume 2 (including BWK's trofftut) was typeset on the original CAT-driving
troff
FWIW (likely little), CAT-driving troff *was* used to drive other
printers, and least for the unwashed. At Boston University in the mid
80's we had a Talaris 1200 (the same Xerox print engine (2700?) as the
DEC LN01). The name QMS (and QUIC) were mixed in there was well. We
had a "qtroff" command that ran the standard 4BSD troff against custom
kerning files (in a.out format!) and interpreted the C/A/T output for
the printer. Then we got the transcript package from Adobe which had
a "ptroff" command that similarly converted C/A/T output to PostScript(*).
I'm not saying interpreting C/A/T output was done at the mother ship,
but it's not impossible either. The big wins with [td]itroff were
more than four fonts, and graphics.
(*) Transcript also came with a "psroff" script that would use
ditroff, if you had it, and the original "enscript" command was in the
transcript package.