Good evening folks, I'm doing some research lately into the typesetting style
apparent in the various UNIX System V guides I've scanned to
archive.org. Their
typesetting style is unlike that of the MM papers published with 3.0 and 4.0, but the
contents seem to have continuity with the text in these collections.
Well, in my searches sometimes telecom documents from the Bell System come up too and in
materials from the 70s and 80s I started noticing that familiar typesetting in telecom
stuff such as that hosted here
https://www.telephonecollectors.info/index.php/browse/bsps-bell-system/bsp-…
The earliest example I could find is 1969, so certainly at least a publication style that
predates UNIX, but what I can't tell from my searches alone is if this style implies
some non-UNIX typesetting system through and through or if there was a macro package
dreamed up at some point between 1969 and 1982 that was in place by the time of the System
V documentation.
Just to detail specifics of the publication style, the commonalities I've found are
the use of specifically bold numbers for page numbers, having the doc title and call
number in the outer upper corner of pages, and just the fonts themselves look very
similar. As an added note, the fonts used in the telecom documents and System V guidance
documentation also resemble those in the copyright statement pasted on the cover of the
extant PDF of the fifth edition UNIX manual. There is also some resemblance to the visual
style observable in USG Program Generic and adjacent documentation (for instance the 1976
kernel description of PG 2 or the MERT 0 documents). This typesetting style is not seen in
known research, CB, nor PWB until 5.0. Was there some separate typesetting system used in
the broader System that, say, WECo may have taken up when they took over documentation
between 3.0 and SVR2?
- Matt G.