9 Mar
2023
9 Mar
'23
3:24 p.m.
As far as I know, Tom Ferrin wrote the original in the late 1970s - it is
on the original UCSF tape as part of his UNIX graphics tools. That said,
Joy may have passed it along on the BSD tapes also. It's called "vcat" and
converts Wang C/A/T codes to plotter strokes on a smaller (11/12in wide
IIRC) Varian (originally) and small Versatec [wet / kerosene style] plotter
using the 200 bpi Hershey fonts that the CMU/MIT/Stanford XGP had used.
IIRC, UCB had a large format Versatec (36"/48") and the UCB version could
do N pages at a time. In the Adobe 'transcript' package is a similar
program (based on Tom work) but outputs using Adobe Fonts.
It might take some searching "foo" to find them, but Tom's program is what
most of us used back in the day before the Imagen and later Apple
LaserWriter - particularly after having had access to an XGP or a Xerox
Dover in college ;-)
ᐧ
On Wed, Mar 8, 2023 at 6:10 PM David Arnold <davida(a)pobox.com> wrote:
On 9 Mar 2023,
at 03:30, Angelo Papenhoff <aap(a)papnet.eu> wrote:
…
And even then one would need CAT emulation, which
I
haven't bothered with yet.
That sounds like a fun project — is there really no such beast already?
d