Re: [TUHS] Troff to ps

[[ sorry for the late reply -- I'm still catching up from a rather tumultuous summer, fall, and first part of winter ]] At Sun, 26 Jul 2020 14:03:49 -0400, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote: Subject: Re: [TUHS] Troff to ps The "psroff" Arnold referred to was written by Chris Lewis and translated the C/A/T codes from the original v7 troff into PostScript. It has nothing to do with the "psroff" that was in the tpscript or Transcript PostScript add-on packages for ditroff, though it was sort of created in parallel with what was happening with ditroff, aka DWB, i.e. the Documenter's Workbench. Psroff is/was kind of like "thack" and orthogonal to "cat2desk". Once upon a time there were FAQs published regularly on Usenet where one could learn all these kinds of things, e.g. the FAQ for comp.text. Psroff was still very necessary at the time because there were a plethora of "unix" vendors who were still basically using very early System V, Xenix, or even 7th Edition licenses, and so there was no hope of thier users ever getting something so modern and cool as ditroff. And there was no Groff (though it appeared shortly thereafter). On example of such a vendor was Spectrix, for whom Chris worked for at the time he initially created psroff. Spectrix was using Xenix, and I think even upgraded as far as Xenix V, but it and its customers were far too cheap for, and more or less going out of business by the time of, ditroff et al. Psroff 2.0 was released when I was working with Chris at Elegant Communications. We were still doing a bit of minor support for the few remaining Spectrix customers, and had a Spectrix machine to do it with, but by then it was pretty old and crusty and not of much interest. I seem to remember we didn't even keep it powered up for most of the time. As I recall even some of the bigger vendors such as Sun and IBM didn't offer ditroff in their base OS, but they did offer old troff. Those were the days of insane AT&T licensing and all the games competitors played around it. For what it's worth, back at that time I had a 3B2 at home and I was running much a more modern version of Unix, complete with ditroff, than anything we had at work at ECI at the time. -- Greg A. Woods <gwoods(a)acm.org> Kelowna, BC +1 250 762-7675 RoboHack <woods(a)robohack.ca> Planix, Inc. <woods(a)planix.com> Avoncote Farms <woods(a)avoncote.ca>