27 Jul
2020
27 Jul
'20
12:03 a.m.
I wonder if it used troff or ditroff and then what it used for the ps
engine (probably Ghostscript) and if ditroff, from where the font metric
tables came? I also wonder what it was using for cat4 to ps conversion
again like Ghostscript. Like most folks in those days (even most
Universities) since Transcript was reasonably inexpensive, most people
bought it after they got their first PS based printer, particularly if they
had chosen to upgrade to ditroff. For Masscomp (one advantage of being a
$10K-$50K machine not a $4K one), I did manage to convince management to
buy ditroff and transcript and buy the distribution license for both. It
increased our price by less than $100 but we justified it that we really
did not want to have to support the original troff and the price to AT&T
and Adobe was just cost of doing business and cheaper for us from a cost of
maintenance standpoint. We then just bundled ditroff/transcript on every
machine. Funny, Sun charged for both, it was fairly cheap - I want to say
$500 a node (Larry may remember). But you had to buy it from
Sun ala-cart. Many (most) universities did not because they already had
the sources for their Vaxen, so then tended to recompile and move it.
At Stellar we used Sun's as the 'porting base' - since we had to buy
AT&T
redistributions licenses anyway, we didn't pay the Sun per node tax.
On Sun, Jul 26, 2020 at 1:11 PM <arnold(a)skeeve.com> wrote:
There was a different psroff posted to
comp.sources.unix volume 20;
that's what I was referring to.
Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
psroff was part of the Transcript FWIW. It was
the moral equi to the UCB
command vtroff which did the call to troff -t ... | vcat
BTW: I just peeked, on Disk 4 of Kirk's archives are the source to both
ditroff and Adobe's transcript in the 'local' directory.
I would suggest starting with transcript, copying to your system and
typing
'make'
That will allow the BSD troff stuff to 'just work' us
pscat/psroff/enscript
et al.
This is how most sites that did not spring for a ditroff license worked
with their Apple Laserwriters or later PS printers.
Then if you want to do the same thing with ditroff, that should 'just
compile' and build and you replace troff with ditroff.
On Sun, Jul 26, 2020 at 11:38 AM <arnold(a)skeeve.com> wrote:
> Some web searching turns up something called 'psroff' from the late 80s
> or so that will convert C/A/T to postscript. Google 'psroff source' and
> you should find something you can use.
>
> Arnold
>
> arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
>
> > Will Senn <will.senn(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > My questions:
> > > 1. Is there a troff to postcript conversion utility present in a
stock
> > > 2.11 system (or even patch level
4xx system)?
> >
> > Troff from that era was designed to drive the C/A/T phototypesetter.
> > There were tools that converted from C/A/T to postscript but they
> > were mostly commercial IIRC.
> >
> > > 2. Is there a way to build postscript directly on the system?
> >
> > Likely not.
> >
> > > 3. Is there an alternative modern way to get to ps or pdf output
from
> > > the nroff/troff that 2.11 has?
> >
> > I would recommend tar-ing up the doc and macros, moving them to Linux
> > or other modern system, and using groff -C to create postscript/pdf.
> > That really will be the fastest way.
> >
> > Arnold
>