Re: [TUHS] troff was not so widely usable

This reminded me of a project that I and a small team did in the 1980s. We were licensees of Sun's NeWS source code, and we wanted our software to be able to use the wide variety of fonts sold commercially by Adobe and font design companies. The problem was, they were encoded in Adobe Type 1 font definitions, which Adobe considered a proprietary trade secret. Our team ended up pulling the ROMs out of an original LaserWriter, and writing and improving a 68000 disassembler. One of our team members read the code, figured out which parts handled these fonts, and how it decoded them. He wrote that down in his own words in a plain text document, not a program, following the prevailing court decisions about how to avoid copyright issues while reverse-engineering a trade secret. Ultimately, we released that document to some interested people, so that others could implement support for Type 1 fonts. Shortly afterward, Adobe magnanimously decided to "release the specification", as Wikipedia says.