> Steffen Nurpmeso <sdao...@yandex.com> wrote: > > Heinz-Jürgen Oertel <hj.oer...@t-online.de> wrote: > |Am Montag, 9. Februar 2015, 16:19:51 schrieb Peter Schaffter: > |> Groffers -- > |> > |> I don't see any mention of this in the list archives, and it's too > |> wonderful to miss. If you want a glimpse of days gone by, have a > |> look at > |> > |> http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/751318.pdf > | > |I like this statement: > |"ROFF is a computer program which produces esthetically pleasing \ > |manuscripts from punched card source texts." > > ..and i hoped that it wasn't used for producing the document in > question, seldom have i seen such huge gaps in between words, it's > almost unreadable (in fact i gave up after a few pages)!
Ye olde line printers didn’t have niceties like non-fixed width fonts or even proportional spacing. For pretty documents, they were still setting type by hand back then. :-) The spacing comment reminds me of when I was using nroff in 1983. We had a NEC daisy-wheel printer that could do arbitrary motions, at least horizontally. I cobbled an nroff “driver” (a compiled struct, IIRC) to even out the word spacing. Still Courier, though. We had a Times-like wheel, and I had made a start on a driver for it when the job dried up. I probably would have had some issues with underlining. — Larry
