In any case, there's a second Volume 2 binder, also V7 [...] Would just be Volume 2 stuff but that represents much more typographical variety. I additionally have an almost complete Usenix 4.2BSD set, just missing the Programmer's Reference Guide, so if you're interested in any visual inspections between the two, happy to sit down at my desk with the magnifying glass tonight and see if I can help out with what you're working on.

Whew. I'm tapped out.

Goodness gracious did the situation lead to a little rabbit hole with the USG/PWB line:

The V7 and 4.2BSD pages are closer than the V7 and V7 HRW Revised edition. [...] The V7 and 4.2BSD material appears to originate from the same plate, although the V7 and V7 revised are noticeably different. For instance, note the change in size of the blot square.

* My hypothesis is that Ossanna's original troff document was troffed some time around the date of its authorship (1976-10-11), and at that time the font set on Bell Labs' Graphic Systems typesetter had a hollow square for \(sq in all 3 fonts. At some point between 1976-10-11 and 1978-08-04 (authorship date of bwk's troff tutorial document), the font set on the very same Graphic Systems typesetter was updated to a newer version that had \(sq as a filled square in Times Bold font - and bwk's doc specifically shows this character in regular and bold, when all others were shown only in regular. Furthermore, the design of /usr/pub/eqnchar was made at the time of \fB\(sq\fP being a filled square, as this construct is used for the "blot" made-up character.

What was the physical form of this book? Was it a "perfect bound" book?

My belief, based on the evidence I have from these publications colophons reporting which phototypesetter was used, is that the \(sq special character was not filled in Graphic Systems C/A/T fonts used by Bell Labs,

but _was_ filled in the bold face by the Autologic APS-5.

I have documented this understanding in the groff_char(7) man page,

Also, my copies of these books are overseas, but I seem to remember that the Holt/Reinhart/Winston (HRW) 1983 reprint of the Seventh Edition

The HRW copies I have are perfect bound. But I can't remember if they were 3-hole punched as well.

Where did you discover the identity and date of the 1998 retypeset of the V7 Volume 2 manual?

I have wondered about this for years. In part to complain, because while it is a _fairly_ faithful reproduction of the original, it is not perfect,

Also https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/202/index.html has some papers with Brian as co-author that talk about the history or the 202 and the background work (troff->ditroff) involved. I am sure these have been posted here before.

Hmmm.. I was thinking of keeping out of this food fight, but a couple of comments concern me a little as they seem to differ from the history as I recall it.

This is true - although I believe that the processor was from Autologic, the typesetter was from Alphanumeric Corp.

the 1978 version of the K&R (which I thought was set on the APS-5 for the first version - although it may have been on the Meganthaler). While I still have a first edition, at one time, I had a copy of the proofs, which I got from tjk in late 1977 IIRC - it might have been the Fall of '78

- Alphanumeric Corp released the Alphanumeric Photocomposition System (APS) #5 in 1976 using an Autologic-73 mini to drive it.

My hypothesis still stands: until someone convinces me otherwise, I shall continue to believe that *every* paper that made its way into V7 Volume 2 (including BWK's trofftut) was typeset on the original CAT-driving troff

Hi Clem, Thank you for various juicy details - but I still have a hard time accepting your timeline. BWK's paper "A Typesetter-independent TROFF" (troff source here, file date 30-Mar-1983: http://medialab.freaknet.org/martin/tape/stuff/ditroff/docs/indep_troff ) contains these passages: | Early in 1979, | the Computing Science Research Center | decided to acquire a new typesetter, | primarily because of our interests in typesetting graphics. | At the same time, | the Murray Hill Computer Center | began to investigate the possibility of replacing their | family of aging CAT's | with a new, high-performance typesetter, then | Accordingly, in the spring of 1979, | I set about to modify | .UC TROFF | so that it would run hence\%forth without change | on a variety of typesetters. then | This version of | .UC TROFF | has been in use | since September of 1979. | Most of our experience with it has been on the | 202 and Tektronix scopes, but the CAT and APS-5 drivers have been | exercised to some degree. The "summer vacation" paper gives a similar timeline: 202 acquired in summer of '79, troff preparatory work done "ahead of time" (consistent with "spring of 1979" in indep_troff paper), production use by Sept of 1979 just like indep_troff says. I admit that I was wrong in my first recollection of 1980 or 81 - but I still have a hard time believing that there was a _working_ ditroff setup in '78. Ideas and thoughts about moving away from CAT-specific troff - sure - but a working setup is a different story. But of course I wasn't there, and you say you were... If ditroff really did exist in 1978-August when BWK wrote the "Troff tutorial" paper (the one that appears right away Ossanna's original manual in V7, 4.2BSD and 4.3BSD docs), why does that paper not contain a single word about it, talking only about the Graphic Systems typesetter? Was the existence of ditroff a closely guarded secret then? Back to my original assertion about \(sq character in Bold having changed from hollow to filled square while still on CAT-4. Let's say I am wrong here and you are right that it became a filled square only in some non-CAT ditroff setup. But if ditroff was secret, non-releasable stuff in 1978 leading up to V7, why did they define "blot" as \fB\(sq\fP in /usr/pub/eqnchar? The distributed system (as of V7) contained only CAT-driving troff and no ditroff - so surely eqnchar was produced to be usable by users of the as-is distributed system... My hypothesis still stands: until someone convinces me otherwise, I shall continue to believe that *every* paper that made its way into V7 Volume 2 (including BWK's trofftut) was typeset on the original CAT-driving troff, and that the filled \(sq in Bold in V7 manuals (in this trofftut document and eqnchar(7) man page in Vol1) indicates that this filled square was present in Bold on CAT-4. Yet this square being hollow in all 3 font samples in Ossanna's original 1976 manual in the very same V7 Vol2 indicates that the font was different back in '76. The only explanation that fits is that some time between 1976-10 and 1978-08 the Bold film strip on the CAT was changed to an updated version from GSI. So why are all papers from those days (ditroff docs, Usenix print notes for 4.3BSD) referring to it as Autologic APS-5? which Now this part is intriguing. Wikipedia says the 1st ed of K&R C book was published February 22, 1978. Are you *absolutely certain* it was troffed on APS-5 or Linotron 202 etc? (I never got a copy, so I don't have a colophon to look at.) If this book, published in early 1978, was indeed produced on a setup that was only possible with ditroff, then why did BWK tell the story of *beginning* ditroff coding work (actual implementation, not just thoughts/ideas) in spring of '79 in preparation for 202 arriving that summer? Another inexplicable mystery with this hypothesis: if ditroff was in some working state (good enough to publish a book) in 1978-Feb, why in the world was it excluded from V7 release - and not only excluded as in shipping code, but total suppression of any mention of its existence? Thank you for decoding what APS stood for! Although in my mind it will probably always be "avtomaticheskiy pistolet Stechkina" in my native Russian. :-) M~

My 16th printing of the 1978 K&R C book says:

Since this is my work, and it was the first PDF produced from the troff sources. So let me set the stage, and this should answer some of the issues you and others have with my work. This was 25 years ago. There were not any scanned images of these documents it be found anywhere online. There was only the incomplete troff sources that were available on a bell labs web page, and that was hardly usable. I wanted an online human readable, computer searchable and a print it anywhere document. That meant one format to me, PDF. So I went about to produce one. It was so much harder than anticipated. I spent a lot of my spare time doing it, it took me months to complete. Someone all ready posted my notes on how I made it in an earlier message. Once I got it to a state where I was happy with it, I stopped. Also the only thing I had to compare my version to was a physical copy of a reprint of the The Bell System Technical Journal Vol 57, No 6, Part 2, July-August 1978 (It had a red cover with the AT&T death star logo, not the original blue cover, nor the 1984 version with a yellow cover). And the book's pages were not US printer paper size of 8.5"x11" but were 5"x8". It was made under Solaris 2.6, on an Ultra 2 ("Pulsar"), using the troff, tbl, eqn, pic, refer and macros as supplied by Sun at that time, and NOT any GNU ones. Why? These were the versions written by AT&T that Sun got directly from them during their SVR4 collaboration. I used the PostScript output option to troff (which obviously did not exist in 1979). That code to produce PostScript outout, had a high probability of being written by the graphics group run by Nils-Peter Nelson in Russ Archer's Murray Hill Computer Center (department 45268). As in the mid 1980s, the computer centers had a SRP (small remote printer) initiative that deployed QMS laser printers (they could only do PostScript level 1) in common areas near where their users were, and connected via datakit or direct serial lines. These QMS printers obsoleted the large and chemically nasty phototypesetters, so they all disappeared from the computer centers. Anyway, now I have a whole bunch of PostScript files, that is hardly usable to read on screen. Nor very searchable, and ONLY printable on PostScript printers. The place I was working at the time decided to save a few dollars, they did not get Adobe licenses for most of their printers, so they could only print PCL. Luckily the free Adobe Acrobat Reader (version 3) which was available on most platforms, could print to PCL. So I need to convert this into PDF. In 1998 there are not too many options. I tried ghostscript but it was too immature to produce anything acceptable to me. I ended up buying my own Adobe Distiller out of pocket, the Windows 95 version, since it was much cheaper than the Solaris as that was only available as a Distiller "server" version. So I then transferred the PostScript files to my windows machine and turned them into the 3 PDFs. But there was a bug in Distiller, it had and offset problem on the lines of every tbl, eqn, or pic, on every platform it was an obvious problem, either viewing it on screen or printing it (both PS and PCL). So I wrote a awk script to modify many of the PostScript files to fix the wrong offset. If you viewed or printed a modified PS file, it looked like it had offset error, but now in the opposite direction. But once distilled into a PDF, that PDF looked and printed like it should. So those modified PS files wound be of no value to share. I then manually add the bookmarks and blank pages that allowed two side printing using the same windows distiller. I had shown it to some others and they thought it was pretty great. But I cannot publish nor host these as this is not my intellectual property and I would need permission. At this time there was not very much available on TUHS, some binary versions all without any source code, that you could boot up on SIMH. I decided I should drop a note to Dennis Ritchie with a copy of the PDFs to see what he tought. Since I had known Dennis slightly from my time working at Murray Hill. I lived across the street from the labs on Burlington Rd and skateboarded into work. It was just across the east employee parking lot, and I would use that eastern entrance. Dennis also lived in the neighborhood, a bit farther from the labs than me, in a cul-de-sac. For a full week once, Dennis kept the complete opposite hours than I did. We would passed each other at the guard station at the entrance. After a few times it got to be a bit comical. Me entering 9ish, "good night Dennis" He would smile. Me leaving 5-6ish: "good morning Dennis". We would exchange pleasantries. I had to walk the skateboard past the guard a bit and not jump back on it, else the guard would give chase, yelling not to skate in the hallway. I always had the idea if someone wanted to sneak into the labs they'd just need to wait for me to go in in the morning, and once the guard was chasing me, they could just walk on in unchallenged. If you worked in MH from 1990-1992 and saw someone on a black on top, neon green bottom skateboard, headed from 2F-164 to the stock room, that was me. Dennis really like the PDFs, and we had a email discussion on what to do with it as it was a derivative work of copyrighted material that I did not have the rights to. He said he needed to do some checking (lawyers?). Eventually he said they would host the PDFs, as it was their property, but would give me full credit for producing it. And once it was freely available on their site, anyone, including myself, could host copies. I provided Dennis with all the added files and all the modified versions of their files, the new run shell and sed scripts and even the awk postscript pre-distiller fixer script. He (or Lucent) declined not put them up along side the PDFs, for whatever reason, and since they were not providing them, I was not to give out those files either. Only files I made myself or the files I found that were all ready available by Lucent (such as the missing headers) were OK for me to host too. This is that v7add.tar.gz file you found, that I only hosted. I also decided (and I told Dennis) I was going to make it so I could identify the PDF files that was my work. In volume 2B, I fixed the typo "oe" to "one" on the RATFOR paper, and I figured no one is going to put in a typo back in. In volume 2A on the "UNIX Programming" page I left the .ND macro as is so it would print the date it was troff'd (December 3, 1998). I did have a volume 2A that also had the correct 7th Edition C Reference Manual in it. The one you get in my 1988 PDF is from the 6th Edition, notice it is the old =+ syntax and not the += one. Dennis said that not even Lucent could provide that as a free PDF, as it was a published book by Prentice-Hall. I was asked to destroy all PDFs that had that version in it. I was going to do something similar to volume 1, but I forgot to do it before that December 3rd run and it got sent to Dennis without a change. And I was not going to tell Dennis and say hey pull that one down and put this one up, thanks. Too late is simply too late. That at some point after they had been out for a while I noticed Dennis added gzipped postscript versions of them, and credited it to Aharon Robbins, who still posts here. I was upset at first, as it looked like half the credit was going to someone who did a print to file and then ran gzip on it. And second, the point of the PDF was so it could print anywhere, those cannot. Anyway I got over it, as none it was mine to start with. And most would probably use the PDF anyway. Larry McVoy asked me for my modified files to make the PDFs too, in 1999 or 2000, for bitkeeper or bitsavers. But since I was not allowed to share them and I had moved companies, I had lost them. I thought I had saved a copy but I could no longer find it. I asked Dennis if he still had them, he did not. This work is truly lost. The next, and last, time I saw Dennis was at the 2000 Summer USENIX in San Diego. I just thought it was funny the looks I got from people when he came up to me to say hello. -Brian Mychaela Falconia wrote: > G. Branden Robinson wrote: > > > My belief, based on the evidence I have from these publications > > colophons reporting which phototypesetter was used, is that the \(sq > > special character was not filled in Graphic Systems C/A/T fonts used by > > Bell Labs, > > I disagree. While the "NROFF/TROFF User's Manual" document proves > that \(sq was hollow in all 3 fonts _as of 1976-10-11_ (the original > date of this doc), bwk's document from 1978-08-04 indicates that this > char had to have changed to a filled square by this date. However, > troff in 1978 was still completely, utterly incapable of driving > anything other than a C/A/T! Now bwk, the author of this doc, is the > very same fine gentleman who wrote ditroff, the creature that was > finally capable of driving a Linotron 202 or Autologic APS-5 or > whatever - but the timeline does not match up. BWK's troff tutorial > is dated 1978-08-04, but his work on ditroff (as I understand it) > happened some time around 1980 or 1981. He may have started ditroff > work in 1979, but definitely not in 1978. > > > but _was_ filled in the bold face by the Autologic APS-5. > > 4.3BSD Usenix books prove otherwise: these must have been troffed on > APS-5, as many notes from that time attest, but they feature hollow > square in bold. Even eqnchar(7) is "wrong" in 4.3BSD print in that > "blot" is a hollow square, clearly counter to original intent of that > named eqn character. > > > I have documented this understanding in the groff_char(7) man page, > > Ahh, so you are involved with groff - got it. I wrote my own version > of troff (based on V7, running under 4.3BSD and directly emitting > DSC-conforming PostScript) in 3 "bursts" of work around 2004, 2010 and > 2012, but I never got around to releasing it. I am now in the process > of cleaning it up for release, hoping to finally have it out in another > week or two. And I put a _lot_ of work into replicating the original > troff character set... > > > Also, my copies of these books are overseas, but I seem to remember that > > the Holt/Reinhart/Winston (HRW) 1983 reprint of the Seventh Edition > > Thank you for clarifying what HRW is - so this 1983 version of 7th ed > UPM is *not* the original? > > > > What was the physical form of this book? Was it a "perfect bound" > > > book? > > > > The HRW copies I have are perfect bound. But I can't remember if they > > were 3-hole punched as well. > > Thank you for the clarification! But if HRW version is not the > original, then what was the original like? > > > Where did you discover the identity and date of the 1998 retypeset of > > the V7 Volume 2 manual? > > https://plan9.io/7thEdMan/bswv7.html > http://web.cuzuco.com/~cuzuco/v7/ > > The second page includes a link to this tarball: > > http://web.cuzuco.com/~cuzuco/v7/v7add.tar.gz > > Dates inside that tarball are 1998-12-13. There was also a place > where Brian missed the retroffing date - see page 287 of his > v7vol2a.pdf. > > > I have wondered about this for years. In part > > to complain, because while it is a _fairly_ faithful reproduction of the > > original, it is not perfect, > > What _I_ don't like about BSW's PDF rendition of V7 manuals is that it > is a sort of "closed source" product: there is no published source > package that retraces every step in the flow from ancient troff sources > to the finished product. > > In the same 3 "bursts" of activity (2004, 2010 and 2012) when I worked > on my own version of troff, I also worked toward doing a PostScript > reprint of 4.3BSD Usenix books. 4.3BSD happens to be my personally > preferred version of UNIX, but the same methods I use for 4.3BSD books > can also be applied to V7. I am hoping that in the next week or two I > will find time to release not only my version of troff, but also the > partial set of 4.3BSD books I got done so far. > > Out of the 7 books that comprise 4.3BSD Usenix set, the breakdown is > as follows: > > * URM, PRM and USD: I got these done already, only need to write new > colophons to be added to the end of each book. These are the ones I > am hoping to put out Real Soon Now. > > * PS1, PS2 and SMM remain to be worked on, but are part of my more > distant plans. > > * The "Master Index" volume, I plan to skip that one - too difficult, > and non-essential in my view. > > And yes, I am much more "perfectionist" about replicating troff details > than BSW was for his V7 PDF version. > > M~ >

You did the right thing: the version you used certainly feels much more "right" than anything from GNU.

After almost 20 y of intermittent development (started in the fall of 2004), I just made the first official release of my version of troff: https://www.freecalypso.org/pub/UNIX/components/troff/qjtroff-r1.tar.Z https://www.freecalypso.org/pub/UNIX/components/troff/qjtroff-r1.tar.gz

Documentation: in 2012 I started writing a proper manual, but ran out of time (had to switch to other projects). Because it can easily be another year or two or ... before I can get back to that documentation and finish it, I decided to release this software as-is, without docs. Too many projects, too little time...

G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson(a)gmail.com> wrote: I don't have enough spoons to engage in political fights any more, so I'll just focus on technical aspects.

The problem you are describing is one which I am *not* actively working on presently. I am _contemplating_ this problem, but not actively working on it. In my current stage of 4.3BSD document set reprinting, I am willing to accept that hyphenations, line breaks and page breaks will be different from the original because of slightly different font metrics, and accept the use of only fi and fl ligatures (in running text, outside of explicit demonstrations) because Adobe's version dropped ff, ffi and ffl. (In places where original troff docs explicitly demonstrate the use of all 5 ligatures, I have a hack that pulls the missing ligs from a different, not-really-matching font.) I am willing to accept this imperfection because it is fundamentally no different from what UCB/Usenix themselves did in 1986: they took Bell Labs docs that were originally written for CAT and troffed them on their APS-5 ditroff setup - but those two typesetters also had slight diffs in their font metrics, causing line and page breaks to move around!

OTOH I am very willing to entertain, as an intellectual exercise, what would it take to produce a new font set that would *truly* replicate the CAT font set at Bell Labs. The spacing widths of the original fonts (the key determinant of where breaks will land) are known, right here: https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/troff/tab3.c

Back in 2004 in one afternoon I threw together a quick-hack program that takes the output of original troff (CAT binary codes) and prints it in PostScript, using standard Adobe fonts. The character positioning is that of original troff, but because the actual font characters don't perfectly match these metrics, the result is not pretty - but the non-pretty result does show *exactly* where every line and page break lands per original intent!

So what would it take to do such a re-creation properly? My feeling is that the task would require hiring a professional typeface designer to produce a modified version of Times font family: modify the fonts to produce good visual results (change actual characters as needed) to fit the prescribed, unchangeable metrics as in spacing widths. And design all 5 f-ligatures while at it.

I have no slightest idea how much it would cost to hire a professional typeface designer to do what I just described, hence I have no idea whether or not it is something that the hobbyist community could potentially afford, even collectively. But it is an interesting idea to ponder nonetheless - which is where I leave it for now.

Can you please elaborate? I personally hate PDF with a passion, but I concede that in order to make my documents readable by people other than me, I have to rcp my .ps file from the 4.3BSD machine to a semi-modern-ish (Slackware) Linux box and run ps2pdf on the file.

But what "slanted symbol" font are you talking about that exists in PostScript but not in PDF? The only PostScript fonts whose existence I take as a given (as opposed to downloading the font explicitly) are the standard 14: 4 Times family fonts, 4 Helvetica family fonts, 4 Courier family fonts, Symbol and ZapfDingbats. Which of these 14 is missing in PDF, and how does "standard" ps2pdf (Ghostscript) handle it?

I also wanted my troff to run under 4.3BSD, using only K&R C, which I reason would probably be impossible with groff. (I recall reading somewhere that groff is written in C++ - so it is completely out of consideration for something that needs to run under 4.3BSD.)

My software is written BY a pirate (me) FOR other pirates. If you are not a pirate, my sw is not for you.

On the subject of troff origins, in a world where troff didn't exist, and one purchases a C/A/T, what was the general approach to actually using the thing? ... or say one of the DEC OSs?

On the subject of troff origins, in a world where troff didn't exist, and one purchases a C/A/T, what was the general approach to actually using the thing?

On the subject of troff origins, in a world where troff didn't exist, and one purchases a C/A/T, what was the general approach to actually using the thing? Was there some sort of datasheet the vendor supplied that the end user would have to program a driver around, or was there any sort of example code or other materials provided to give folks a leg up on using their new, expensive instrument? Did they have any "packaged bundles" for users of prominent systems such as 360/370 OSs or say one of the DEC OSs?

The ISBN Al's got is the same one I have for vol 1, but for volume two, he lists 0-03-061742-X, whereas mine is 0-03-061743-X,