Re: Why does groff require psutils?

[G. Branden Robinson]

At 2024-03-17T12:59:51+0100, Alexis wrote:
> > I'm sorry I let this fall onto the floor.  Picking it up...
> 
> That's alright; thanks for picking it up again, much appreciated!
[...]
> Do let me know if you desire or require further testing or changes, or
> if I can be helpful in other ways to drive this change forward.

I've pushed this.  Thank you!

Regards,
Branden


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Re: the Courier font family and nroff history

[Peter Schaffter]

On Sun, Mar 24, 2024, Steve Izma wrote:
> Do you remember what the costs of the Linotronic machines would
> have been?

IIRC, the 202 cost between $40,000 and $60,00 at the end of the
eighties.  The 300 series ran about $60,000.

-- 
Peter Schaffter
https://www.schaffter.ca

Re: the Courier font family and nroff history

[Russ Allbery]

"G. Branden Robinson"  writes:

> It sounds like the way is clear to change perldoc's default back to
> Pod::Man plus nroff.  ;-)

See https://github.com/briandfoy/pod-perldoc/pull/36.  It looks like it's
being worked on, but there's apparently some complexity downstream of both
of us in figuring out a good pager to use.

> Thomas Dickey has a huge section in the ncurses FAQ about this.

> https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/ncurses.faq.html

> Scroll down to:
>   Why not make “xterm” equated to "xterm-256color"?

This reminded me that it had been a while since I'd looked around Thomas
Dickey's web site, and I spent a very enjoyable day reacquainting myself
with his writing style.  :)

> My copy may be even more out of date than yours, but let's see if we can
> get at least this claim fixed.

>Support for code 3 (italic) is rare and therefore not mentioned
>in that table.  It is not believed to be fully supported by any
>of the terminals listed, although it’s displayed as green in the
>Linux console, but it is reportedly supported by urxvt.

> grotty(1):
>-i Render oblique‐styled fonts (I and BI) with the SGR
>   attribute for italic text rather than underlined text.
>   Many terminals don’t support this attribute; however,
>   xterm(1), since patch #314 (2014‐12‐28), does.  Ignored if
>   -c is also specified.

Ah, thank you.  Confirmed.  I suspect at some point in the past I forgot
that I have to configure xterm to use a TrueType font in order to get a
lot of the font behavior.  (I use a bitmap font because it's substantially
more readable for long periods of time than any TrueType font I've found
at equivalent sizes, but using a bitmap font disables some of xterm's font
family support.)

Also, some of the other parameters that weren't supported the last time I
checked seem to be supported now by at least xterm, namely "crossed-out"
or strikethrough and double-underline.  I need to add those to the module.

I've made some updates, but I am very overdue for another round of work on
that module.

-- 
Russ Allbery (ea...@eyrie.org) 

Re: the Courier font family and nroff history

[Steve Izma]

On Sun, Mar 24, 2024 at 03:39:45PM -0400, Peter Schaffter wrote:
> Subject: Re: the Courier font family and nroff history
> 
> On Sat, Mar 23, 2024, Steve Izma wrote:
> > I tend to believe that Linotype was the driving force in the
> > release of a complete package for corporate typesetters: the
> > Linotronic 202 (or something like it) driven by Adobe's new
> > PostScript rasterizer (RIP), using ITC fonts, and with two
> > choices of front ends: either a very expensive inputting and
> > editing terminal made by Linotype or else a much cheaper (almost
> > hobby-level) Macintosh.
> 
> I worked in a shop in the early '90s that used a Linotronic RIP
> connected to two dedicated Linotype terminals and several MacIIfx
> computers.  I wouldn't call those Macs cheap or hobby-level, not by
> a long shot. :)

Hi Peter,

You're right about the the 1990s-era Macs, but I'm trying to
recall the situation around 1985. I certainly couldn't afford a
Mac at that time but I'm pretty sure that small-to-medium-sized
printshops could, since they'd be so much cheaper than the
Linotype devices. But the Linotype frontends were essentially
single-purpose ones, weren't they? So they would have become
obsolete quickly.

I also recall that Macs were the favourites of art-school
students starting in the mid-1980s because the machines were more
oriented towards graphics software than the early Windows
systems. I think this was a factor in driving development of Macs
to the point that in the 1990s their sophistication and prices
sky-rocketed. Those students became the scriptorium scribes for
ad agencies and must have had an influence in the technological
shifts in the design industry.

But to me, the early Macs were only a couple of steps above
video-game devices.

Do you remember what the costs of the Linotronic machines would
have been?

At WLU Press, we were able to do things much more cheaply with
PCs running Unix-like software (MKS Toolkit) driving a nearly
obsolete Merganthaler VIP up until about the mid-1990s. That was
for high-quality output. For quick-and-dirty work to produce
low-printrun scholarly monographs we used SQTroff on 386/ix (I
think it was called) running fairly good laser printers. We also
sometimes used SQTroff as ported by MKS to MS-DOS up until I got
the hang of groff and linux (1996?).

-- Steve

-- 
Steve Izma
-
Home: 35 Locust St., Kitchener, Ontario, Canada  N2H 1W6
E-mail: si...@golden.net  cellphone: 519-998-2684

==
The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best – and
therefore never scrutinize or question.
-- Stephen Jay Gould, *Full House: The Spread of Excellence
   from Plato to Darwin*, 1996

Re: the Courier font family and nroff history

[Peter Schaffter]

On Sat, Mar 23, 2024, Steve Izma wrote:
> I tend to believe that Linotype was the driving force in the
> release of a complete package for corporate typesetters: the
> Linotronic 202 (or something like it) driven by Adobe's new
> PostScript rasterizer (RIP), using ITC fonts, and with two
> choices of front ends: either a very expensive inputting and
> editing terminal made by Linotype or else a much cheaper (almost
> hobby-level) Macintosh.

I worked in a shop in the early '90s that used a Linotronic RIP
connected to two dedicated Linotype terminals and several MacIIfx
computers.  I wouldn't call those Macs cheap or hobby-level, not by
a long shot. :)

-- 
Peter Schaffter
https://www.schaffter.ca