We had vtroff at Berkeley around 1980, on the big Versatec wet plotter, 4 pages wide. We got really good at cutting up the pages on the output.

It used the Hershey font. It was horrible. Mangled somehow, lots of parts of glyphs missing. I called it the "Horse Shit" font.

I took it as my mission to clean it up. I wrote "fed" to edit it, dot by dot, on the graphical HP 2648 terminal at Berkeley. I got all the fonts reasonably cleaned up, but it was laborious.

I still hated Hershey. It was my dream to get real C/A/T output at the largest 36 point size, and scan it in to create a decent set of Times fonts. I finally got the C/A/T output years later at Bell Labs, but there were no scanners available to me at the time. Then True Type came along and it was moot.

I did stumble onto one nice rendition of Times Roman in one point size, from Stanford, I think. I used it to write banner(6).

Ron. That’s awesome.  Ferrin used the Same set of Hersey Font that the XGP used.  He got them from Stanford as I recall but they were publically (aka open source) 

On Wed, Feb 10, 2021 at 7:28 PM Ron Natalie <ron@ronnatalie.com> wrote:

We used nroff quite a bit with both the Model37 teletype (for which it
wsa designed, ours even had the greek box on it) and with output filters
for the lineprinter and the Diablos.

Later on we drove troff into cat emulators that used Versatec printers. 
    I don’t knwo wher Berkely’s vcat got their fonts, but the JHU verset
had an amusing history on that.

George Toth went down to the NRL which had a real CAT and printed out
the fonts in large point size on film.    In the basement of the
biophysics bulding was a scanning transmission electron microscope which
used a PDP-11/20 as its controller and an older (512x512 or so)
framebuffer.    George took the scanning wires off the microsope nad
hooked them up to the X and Y of a tektronics oscilliscope.    Then he
put a photomutlipler tube in a scope camera housing and hoked the sense
wire from the microscope to that.

He now had the worlds most expensive flying spot scanner.   He’d tape
one letter at a time to the scope and then bring up the microscope
sofware (DOS/BATCH I think) and tell it to run the microscope.    Then
without powering down the memory in the framebuffer, he’d boot up
miniunix and copy the stuff from the framebuffer to an RX05 pack.
After months of laboriously scanning he was able to write the CAT
emulator.

I had gone to work for Martin Marietta wirking on a classified project
so I wrote hacks to the -mm macro package to handle security markings
(automatically putting the highest on each page on thte top and bottom).
    Later when ditroff became available I continued to use it with
various laserprinters.    I even wrote macropackages to emulate IBM’s
doc style when we were contracting with them.

This was all to the chagrin of my boss who wanted us to switch to
Framemaker.

--

Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual