[TUHS] Re: Fwd: Trove of CSTR's

At 2024-09-28T19:20:07-0700, Larry McVoy wrote: troff didn't exist yet in 1971. That is proper typesetting, though. I don't know enough to say if it's phototypeset or hot lead (can the naked eye reliably tell, if both techniques are of high quality?). We could take the question to the real typographers on the groff list. roff(7): Third Edition Unix also brought the pipe(2) system call, the explosive growth of a componentized system based around it, and a “filter model” that remains perceptible today. Equally importantly, the Bell Labs site in Murray Hill acquired a Graphic Systems C/A/T phototypesetter, and with it came the necessity of expanding the capabilities of a roff system to cope with a variety of proportionally spaced typefaces at multiple sizes. Ossanna wrote a parallel implementation of nroff for the C/A/T, dubbing it troff (for “typesetter roff”). Unfortunately, surviving documentation does not illustrate what requests were implemented at this time for C/A/T support; the troff(1) man page in Fourth Edition Unix (November 1973) does not feature a request list, unlike nroff(1). Apart from typesetter‐driven features, Unix Version 4 roffs added string definitions (.ds); made the escape character configurable (.ec); and enabled the user to write diagnostics to the standard error stream (.tm). Around 1974, empowered with multiple type sizes, italics, and a symbol font specially commissioned by Bell Labs from Graphic Systems, Kernighan and Lorinda Cherry implemented eqn for typesetting mathematics. In the same year, for Fifth Edition Unix, Ossanna combined and reimplemented the two roffs in C, using that language’s preprocessor to generate both from a single source tree. Regards, Branden