Angelo - If you worried about the 'look' of a page, I think the thing to be more worried about is the differences in very early troff is the definition of the CAT typesetter and how it maps what you have now (PostScript). Programs like vcat and later pscat, that were built by reverse engineering the output of troff and then did a sort of crude mapping to the raster fonts that were publically available.
At the time, the primary fonts kicking around (the Arpanet) were the
Hershey Fonts (which were vector fonts for CRTs). I'm fairly sure that Les Earnest and Larry Tessler used them with a film recorder at Stanford on the PDP-10 being driven by "Pub" (which was a contemporary to troff and ran on the PDP-10s). Rich Johnsson of CMU wrote the code for the original XGP* (at 200 dpi) and I'm not sure who did the translation from vectors to bits although
Chuck Geschke
(Wulf’s first PhD student @ CMU, founder of Adobe) I think had his hand in it **
The original UNIX 'plotter' emulator for troff (the vcat family of UNIX tools originally done by Tom Ferin at UCSF IIRC) used the Hershey fonts that came from the XGP work from the PDP-10. This worked and as users, we were pretty happy because most of us did not have access to real typesetters, much less something as cool at the XGP. But the fonts were 'ugly' in comparison to future ideas like Metafont an PS, where as, Adobe's pscat was using a more precise definition.
That said, in those days my eye was not trained enough to see a many of the differences. But some production oriented folks (like Tim O'Reilly) used to complain that is the AT&T output (CAT4) was different from what the Imagen*** produced [which was the first large scale 'laser printer' replacement after the Bensen Varian (/dev/va) and other 'wet' plotters].
Clem
* In '64 Xerox invented 'long distance xerography' (LDX) - which was a FAX system that used a monochrome CRT to draw a single line of pixels on a xerographic 'drum.' Xerox loaned/gave one to CMU, Stanford and MIT in '72. CMU spliced on to a PDP-11 and had it running my March '72 [BTW, I recently found pictures of the original toilet paper diploma printing hack using it]. Stanford and MIT duplicated the CMU trick, with Stanford's XGP coming online Jan '73 and MIT sometime thereafter].
**Great historical side story - Chuck Geschke filed the first PhD printed on XGP (at CMU) and it was originally rejected because the CMU library wanted the 'originals.' It took Wulf 6-9 months to convince the administration there were no other 'masters' - the library had the originals.
***We had a early Imagen at Masscomp, Tim duplicated our set up in Cambridge shortly there after. In fact, I know Tim ended buying a CAT/4 early on in ORA's life (used IIRC) -- which I think the first used to set the X-11 manuals, which of course what what 'made' ORA.