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@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@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@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@skeeve.com wrote:
> >
> > > Will Senn <will.senn@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
> >