7 Jan
2024
7 Jan
'24
9:21 a.m.
Phil Budne <phil(a)ultimate.com> wrote:
FWIW (likely little), CAT-driving troff *was* used to
drive other
printers, and least for the unwashed.
Oh yes, I know! In the branch of UNIX closest to my heart, CSRG at
UCB had vtroff(1) for driving Varian/Versatec raster output devices
with a CAT-emulating post-processor to original troff. My recent
discovery of scanned 4.2BSD Usenix docs (thank you, Ms. Erica Fischer,
whoever and wherever you are!) tells me that vtroff(1) for casual
prints plus a real CAT for serious typesetting was still the only
troff setup at UCB as of 4.2BSD, i.e., no ditroff yet. In the days of
4.3BSD CSRG used ditroff internally, but could not ship it because of
licensing nonsense, and by this point some early Xerox EP printer
(speaking Interpress, apparently) replaced Varian/Versatec as the
"default" device for casual prints, whereas APS-5 took the place of
CAT for serious typesetting jobs.
I'm not saying interpreting C/A/T output was done
at the mother ship,
but it's not impossible either. The big wins with [td]itroff were
more than four fonts, and graphics.
Second sentence: I agree absolutely. But while people did take output
of original troff and converted it to either raster or PostScript,
I am not quite sure if one could drive something like APS-5 in this
manner - I'll have to think about it.
M~