Re: the Courier font family and nroff history (was: mandoc(1)'s man pages, groffed, and Project KIC)

[Lennart Jablonka]

Quoth G. Branden Robinson:
> At 2024-03-19T19:59:58+0000, Lennart Jablonka wrote:
> > Right.  We can emulate the nonsense typewriter /emulators/ do.  I do
> > think that we shouldn’t do that, either.
>
> I would not describe character-cell video terminals as "typewriter
> emulators" precisely because they don't emulate typewriters well in
> certain respects.  The most obvious of these is that CCVTs, if you will,
> don't overstrike.

Right.  Not typewriter emulators, then, but typewriter emulator 
emulators.  I don’t think we need to emulate typewriter emulator 
emulators.

        .Sarcasm
        What’s next?
        Should the printed book of Groff man pages be read with 300 baud?
        If I don't understand something, should I send a break signal,
        for the book to switch to a different baud rate?
        .EndSarcasm

> Back in the cradle, at the Bell Labs CSRC, the team famously pursued a
> human-computer interface gambit, skipping over so-called "glass TTYs"
> altogether, leapfrogging from paper terminals to a Xerox PARC-esque
> portrait-mode green screen graphical terminal with mouse called,
> variously, the "Jerq", the "Blit", and "DMD 5620".  In the Eighth
> Edition Unix manual you can read much about the intended interface to
> this device.  Rob Pike's fingerprints coated this system thoroughly.

While I never used a hardware Blit, I have used both Plan 9 and 
its device multiplexer rio(1), whose interface is very similar to 
mpx/mux, and 9front’s Blit-emulator with an 8th Edition VM.  
Coming from the Plan 9 world, it’s always fun to read how much of 
what we think of special of Plan 9 appeared in Research Unix’s 
last three editions.  Beside the other stuff there.

Late Research Unix had both troff and TeX in use, but did you know 
about its own new typesetting program, monk?

https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V10/vol2/monk/monk.m

> That is why I value and appreciate your patch to make grotty a
> terminfo(3) application, even though I'm slow as hell to integrate it.
>
> Yes, I probably would move a little faster if I didn't spend entire
> mornings composing emails like this one.  :-|

Not to worry: While I do wish for upstream grotty to use terminfo 
soon, I also enjoy reading your emails like that one.

> > At 2024-03-22T13:24:04-0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> > and video terminals emulated typewriters well enough for unserious
> > work like formatting man pages on a screen.
>
> Err, this is pretty hugely false.
>
> They didn't.
>
> That's why you had to pipe nroff's output through col(1) or ul(1).
>
> This fact got obscured, including from me just now, by the fact that
> some pager programs took it upon themselves to interpret backslashes in
> their input streams.  Probably because that's what the Teletype Model
> 37-oriented nroff produced for man pages, which lots of people read on
> their video terminals.

… backslashes?  You might mean backspaces.  Or perhaps reverse 
line feeds.

If you mean backspaces: No, I think man pages are readable enough 
even without emboldening and underlining.  I feel like defending 
Plan 9, you understand.  Its nroff does emit reverse line feeds 
for occasions like two-column output, but it does not emit 
backspaces for bold and underlined text, as far as I can tell.  
When using the man(1) script to view man pages using nroff, you 
aren’t gonna get any font changes in your rio layer.

With which we’re back at the Jerq/Blit and its heritage: While 
nroff did not gain terminfo support in 1127 because they had 
a graphics system that, being superior to glass typewriter 
emulators, did not understand ACME-48-esque escape sequences.  But 
even with that graphics system—that sure had proof(9)—they chose 
to read man pages on-line without bold and underlined text.

I’m afraid I’m not intimately familiar with the man page-reading 
process at 1127.  I don’t know how many dead tree volumes were 
flying around or how much they used man -T.

[proof(9)]: https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V10/man/man9/proof.9