It's in plan9port. https://github.com/9fans/plan9port

Btw. The heirloom version of troff is from Solaris SVR4 which should be quite close the version from the 3B20 Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual On Fri, Oct 4, 2024 at 7:01 PM Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:

This isn’t helpful, but the .G1 .G2 look a lot like Gerber codes used in NC machine tools. Sent from my iPhone

Hi Clem, At 2024-10-05T09:14:27-0400, Clem Cole wrote: I generally get good results with it as well. I frequently compare the behaviors of DWB 3.3 troff and Heirloom troff with 2-3 versions of GNU troff (1.22.4 [2018], 1.23.0 [2023], and bleeding-edge development). Setting aside the issue of extensions (whether to the *roff language, to preprocessors, or to macro packages), I find that Heirloom fixes many DWB bugs. I think GNU troff can boast of slightly better terminal support, although nroff veterans are sometimes scandalized by GNU troff's terminal output driver (grotty(1)) assuming that it's _not_ talking to a Teletype Model 37, but rather a more-or-less ECMA-48 video terminal. To brutally abbreviate the history, for $reasons Unix nroff got frozen in amber in 1978 with respect to terminal support, and continues to live in a world where the termcap and terminfo libraries were never written. Unfortunately, the maintainer of the less(1) pager still presumes (prefers?) that world. A previous groff maintainer observed that few of our users operate paper terminals. (Nevertheless grotty retains support for them with its `-c` option.) Anton Shepelev wrote a summary I find admirably concise and blunt: "`grotty' is not an appendix to a pager, but a program for printing direct to the terminal. Most terminals support those basic ANSI control sequences, and many console programs freely use them. If a pager cannot transparently forward them to the terminal, it is a problem of the pager, not of `grotty', and having a broken -man configuration by default to just to appease `less' is stupid." Yes. Our ms(7) manual ("ms.ms"), originally by Larry Kollar, concedes its limitations. --- snip --- 7.1. Unix Version 7 ms macros not implemented by groff ms Several macros described in the Unix Version 7 ms documentation are unimplemented by groff ms because they are specific to the requirements of documents produced internally by Bell Laboratories, some of which also require a glyph for the Bell System logo that groff does not sup‐ port. These macros implemented several document type formats (EG, IM, MF, MR, TM, TR), were meaningful only in conjunction with the use of certain document types (AT, CS, CT, OK, SG), stored the postal addresses of Bell Labs sites (HO, IH, MH, PY, WH), or lacked a stable definition over time (UX). To compatibly render historical ms documents using these macros, we advise your documents to invoke the rm request to re‐ move any such macros it uses and then define replacements with an au‐ thentically typeset original at hand.[10] For informal purposes, a sim‐ ple definition of UX should maintain the readability of the document’s substance. ┌───────────────┐ │ .rm UX │ │ .ds UX Unix\" │ └───────────────┘ ─────────── [10] The removal beforehand is necessary because groff ms aliases these macros to a diagnostic macro, and you want to redefine the aliased name, not its target. --- end snip --- The point of the `UX` macro was to abstract away the problem of sticking a footnote at the bottom of the page to acknowledge (or in the Labs' case, announce) the holder of the Unix trade mark on its first occurrence. I suspect the CSRC did not anticipate that the trade mark would ever change hands, let alone how many times... Regards, Branden

Hi Jaap, At 2024-10-06T14:54:59+0200, Jaap Akkerhuis wrote: Yes. When Kernighan refactored V7 troff/nroff for device-independence, he implemented a similar scheme for each. While for troff, this resulted in device and font description files, "DESC" and a motley variety of capitalized one-or-two letter names for fonts, for nroff they were termed "driving tables", a terminological choice that concealed how closely they resembled the troff scheme. Compare, for example: https://github.com/n-t-roff/DWB3.3/blob/master/postscript/devopost/DESC https://github.com/n-t-roff/DWB3.3/blob/master/postscript/devopost/R with: https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V10/cmd/troff/tab.37 https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V10/cmd/troff/tab.450 ...and the family resemblance seems clear. I have heard tell of a "binary format" for Kernighan troff device and font descriptions but never encountered it. groff never attempted to replicate it and I gather that Plan 9 troff also discarded it. Right. The Diablo features heavily in early '80s Unix documentation. However none of this has much to do, in my opinion, with the _terminal capability databases_ offered by termcap and (later) terminfo. The whole point of these is to _query_ the user's terminal type, not have to be told it with some `-T` option. To my knowledge, no nroff has ever simply looked at "$TERM" and then decided how to format output. Approximately all other Unix software that writes to a terminal behaves that way. nroff didn't, and by God some Unix grognards would have it stay that way.[1][2] Mark Nudelman's less(1) is probably the foremost contributor of inertia here, since man(1) is far and away the leading application of nroff(1), and less(1) the victorious pager program after a long and bloody campaign of attrition. (This isn't a complaint; we could have done worse. most(1) could have won instead.[3]) Lennart Jablonka has contributed a patch to groff to resolve this longevous discrepancy. (It ended up on my slow path for integration because I decided I needed to understand terminfo much better, and that in turn led me to contribute a large volume of man page revisions to ncurses, many of which can be enjoyed(?) in its 6.5 release.[4]) https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?63583 Regards, Branden [1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=312935 [2] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/729124/linux-9-commands-send-ansi-… [3] https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/ncurses-slang.html [4] https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/announce.html https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/man/ Despite his grognard standpoint with respect to grotty(1)'s default use of SGR escape sequences in output, I would emphasize that Thomas Dickey has been a pleasure to work with. It's difficult to imagine the same being true of Alan Curry.

I got a chuckle because apparently an old quote of mine is enshrined in the GROFF documentation (under the debugging section): Standard troff voodoo, just put a power of two backslashes in front of it until it works and if you still have problems add a \c. — Ron Natalie Thanks, G. Branden Robinson, for calling it to my attention. More nroff fun and games: My first job out of college was working on a restricted government project on RSX-11/M. I’d been doing various UNIX and n/troff stuff for years at JHU. The QA people decided to go all PWB on this project using SCCS etc… I knew that Denis Mumaugh at the NSA had written nroff macros to do classification markings automatically. I asked for a copy, but he couldn’t figure out how to get a tape to me. I reimplemented it myself. Originally, I had the idea of processing each marked paragraph into a diversion but that was problematic. I then just output the footer and then “reverse fed” the paper back to the top to add the top classification. Of course, you had to run your nroff via col to get it to print right. I also fixed the line printer spooler to catch classification markings and mark them pages appropriately as well. All this I did while waiting the 11 months for my ‘beyond TS’ clearance to arrive. Seems like everybody on the project failed their polygraph the first time. Examiner must have had a hard seat on the bus from the east coast. This was also the project where I had this exchange: Bernie: What’s all this Bell System crud in the editor? Me: It’s UNIX. It’s all Bell System crud. I walk around to his terminal and see this: $ 1 One Bell System. It works. $ 1 One Bell System. It works. Me: You’re not in the editor, Bernie. After that the /usr/bin/1 command was changed to echo “You’re not in the editor, Bernie.”

Hi Leah, At 2024-10-07T16:50:48+0200, Leah Neukirchen wrote: Yeah. People's ire seems to rise from the fact that grotty's default is to assume SGR support and less's default is to not interpret SGR. I would prefer that `-R` were less's default; that would better serve the larger proportion of ECMA-48 video terminals using the pager versus those using it with (an emulator of) hardcopy terminals. Whatever transition process needs to commence for that to happen, I think it should. But in the meantime it's no great effort for me (nor for most people) to alias 'less' to 'less -R', write a shell function to do similarly, or just type three more characters. (For those requiring accessibility assistance, shell aliases and functions, programmable key bindings, and similar should serve as they do the merely impatient.) Regards, Branden

[dropped Clem and Leah from CC] Hi Doug, At 2024-10-08T10:33:35+0000, Jacobson, Doug W [E CPE] wrote: 8-O Oh, wall clock time including human engagement. That sounds really reasonable! I'm not sure I want to estimate how many hours I've put into revising groff's own documentation. Or ncurses's. Eight hours processing time on a modern machine (without inflooping) would be shocking to me. No PostScript or PDF preview program? I can think of a few: mupdf, evince, okular. Deri James (groff developer) can probably name a dozen. If you'd care to share it with me in my capacity as groff maintainer, I'd be interested to use it for unofficial regression testing. Alternatively, if you can't find an interested publisher, please consider asking the author (I assume he's also the copyright holder) to release it under a Creative Commons license so the whole world can enjoy. Also, so I can selfishly enjoy the pleasure of pointing to a sophisticated typeset work and saying, "look what groff can do!" ;-) (Just in case people aren't impressed enough with K&R or W. Richard Stevens.) Regards, Branden