28 Jun
2024
28 Jun
'24
4:07 p.m.
Hi.
G. Branden Robinson
<g.branden.robinson(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> So maybe they had access to a CAT-8 after all, and used a whopping 5
> different font plates. Or they used a CAT-4 and had to compose many
> pages in two passes. That would have been mightily tedious.
Mychaela Falconia <falcon(a)freecalypso.org> wrote:
Are you certain that the bold in that book is real B
font and not .bd
construct? I am not sure about the full K&R book, but the C Reference
Manual doc in vol 2 seems to have been troff'ed with .bd for bold
(while keepting R, I, S and adding CW), ditto for the UNIX Programming
doc in the same volume that similarly uses CW for program listings.
The use of .bd is indeed the case. I asked. :-)
From BWK, forwarded by permission.
Date: Fri, 28 Jun 2024 04:02:06 -0400 (EDT)
From: Brian Kernighan <bwk(a)cs.princeton.edu>
To: Aharon Robbins <arnold(a)skeeve.com>
Subject: Re: can you comment
I can't find the macros we used, though I have the text itself.
I know that there were only 4 font positions, period. One of
those definitely was S, the special font. I think that we
mounted the CW font in position 3 for programs, and we used
the .bd command to simulate bold by overstriking with a small
offset. Joe Ossanna had added that to troff as a favor not
long before he died.
The source for the second edition of Programming Style, which
dates from about the same time, is consistent with this.
On Fri, 28 Jun 2024, Aharon Robbins wrote:
> https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2024-June/030267.html
>
> Question has arisen as to how you got more than 4 font families
> when setting K&R-1.
>
> Arnold