Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!sq!ian From: i...@sq.UUCP Newsgroups: comp.text Subject: The rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated Message-ID: <1987Feb6.161011.10075@sq.uucp> Date: Fri, 6-Feb-87 16:10:11 EST Article-I.D.: sq.1987Feb6.161011.10075 Posted: Fri Feb 6 16:10:11 1987 Date-Received: Tue, 10-Feb-87 18:57:43 EST References: <505@geac.UUCP> <112@tg.UUCP> <513@geac.UUCP> Reply-To: i...@sq.UUCP (Ian F. Darwin) Organization: SoftQuad Inc., Toronto Lines: 102 Keywords: troff SoftQuad Checksum: 41599 Summary: troff lives Some contributors to the discussions in this newsgroup seem to convey the impression that troff is dying of old age. Paraphrasing Mark Twain, the rumors of troff's death are greatly exaggerated. Troff is alive and well and living in the UNIX environment. Several sites are doing significant troff development. Brian Kernighan at Bell Labs Research continues to come up with pre-processors, such as ``chem'', a program to insert chemical drawings with elements such as benzene rings into place in a text, just as eqn puts equations into place in a text. Berkeley has added several extensions to troff. Several other universities are developing or modifying troff. A dozen or so companies offer ditroff drivers for popular laser printers and typesetters (Image Network sells one for the LN03). Troff has even been ported to MS-DOS by Elan Computer Group. And then there is SoftQuad. SoftQuad set out to make production quality typesetting software for UNIX. ``Production quality typesetting'' in this regard means the type of type (so to speak) that would be acceptable in an old-style craft printing house. There is quite literally nothing available that is up to these typographer's standards. Not Scribe. Not TeX. Not AT&T's ditroff. Not Mac-Anything. Not PageMaker. All these are fine products in their own field, have been used to typeset many papers and theses and a small mountain of books. But none of them will stand up in a job printing shop with high standards and commercial pressures. The founders of SoftQuad considered several packages as possible starting points (including Scribe, TeX, and ditroff), and settled (in 1984) on ditroff. They set out to make it usable in commercial typography. Two of the most important problems were the lack of a hyphenation dictionary facility and the lack of kerning. Avi Naiman (who used to work with us) mentioned a paper we did at USENIX in January, 1985 describing some of the work. By that time the company had in place a ditroff with proper hyphenation and with contour kerning. They had also totally rewritten the ditroff intermediate language to be easier to pass through UNIX software tools like awk. In the ditroff intermediate language, for example, the input string ``hello'' might appear as ``ch 19e17l10l10on423 0'' while in ours it appears as ``hello''. Both ditroff and sqtroff intermediate languages contain only ascii characters (unlike SCRIBE and DVI files which contain ``unprintable'' characters: h\220G\034ello). Production publishing shops need to be able to extract (from a trial formatting run) arbitrary information beyond what most formatters provide. Having the intermediate language in a readable form (that admittedly owes some of its form to PostScript) allows simple shell scripts with programs like grep or awk to process the intermediate file to extract this information. We also have made life easier for those who must ``meddle in the affairs of troff''. We've added a comprehensive trace facility that lets you see what a troff macro really does. We allow names longer than two characters, so you no longer need to write macros with names that look like bird droppings. And we've cleaned up the code - a lot. For more technical details on what we've done, see the USENIX paper (Dallas, January 1985, page 165) or contact us. Note that the address shown in that paper has changed. The remainder of this notice deals with licensing and commercial issues; if you are an anti-commercial techie, this may hurt your ears; so reach for your interrupt key now! Despite the urgings of our marketing people, we try very hard not to ship a product until it is ready. Thus we did not ship any formal released products until June, 1986, although a few friends and associates received our software before that. Since then, a number of books has been produced at sites using our software, and many papers and theses typeset (if you were at the UniForum trade show, you might have seen the SCO Third Party Software catalog - it was typeset with SoftQuad troff). Despite the enhancements to troff and the changes to the intermediate language, most old troff files will work with our product. As was pointed out, our LN03 driver has not been shipped yet. Admittedly our sales staff did accept a purchase order for it several months ago (the customer, GEAC, was told before ordering that no specific delivery date had been set for the LN03). We are running the LN03 software in-house, but we aren't yet happy with the fonts, so we can't ship it as production software. When we do ship a preliminary version of something, we try to so identify it. Our customers have a right to expect prompt shipment of orders that we accept, but because we currently ship only binary products, customers also have a right to expect it to work ``out of the box''. When it is ready, we will ship it. We are a source licensee of AT&T's Documentor's WorkBench product. But we do not have a monopoly on distribution of DWB. If your printing needs don't include top-quality typography, and want to write your own drivers and support them and put big fixes into troff yourself, you should certainly be able to order the unsupported DWB Release 1 or 2 source from AT&T. If you want a quality typesetting product that is derived from DWB and is supported, we hope you will order from us. Ian Darwin, Director of R&D, SoftQuad, Inc. 720 Spadina Avenue, Toronto, Ontario Canada M5S 2T9 +1 416 963-8337 Opinions expressed herein *are* those of SoftQuad, Inc., and the author. The product names used herein are trademarks of their respective manufacturers and/or vendors.
Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!utgpu!utfyzx!sq!ian From: i...@sq.UUCP Newsgroups: comp.text Subject: SoftQuad history: Troff vs TeX Message-ID: <1987Feb17.154939.3148@sq.uucp> Date: Tue, 17-Feb-87 15:49:39 EST Article-I.D.: sq.1987Feb17.154939.3148 Posted: Tue Feb 17 15:49:39 1987 Date-Received: Thu, 19-Feb-87 00:36:52 EST References: <112@tg.UUCP> <513@geac.UUCP> <1987Feb6.161011.10075@sq.uucp> Organization: SoftQuad Inc., Toronto Lines: 67 Keywords: troff SoftQuad Checksum: 62177 Several people have asked me, in response to my previous posting on SoftQuad Troff, for a detailed answer on why SoftQuad originally chose troff over TeX. ``Small is beautiful'' (although I use the term loosely when talking about troff internals). Troff proper is smaller (because it is intentionally designed to delegate gruntwork to pre- and post-processors). Because it is smaller, there are fewer design decisions imbedded in the code. Troff's operating mode conforms to UNIX program conventions. It does not ask you for filenames, nor does it put its output into magic filenames (InputFileName.dvi, etc). As a result, it works well in pipeplines, resulting in an abundance of pre-processors. These are relatively easy to write (as opposed, say, to trying to add the corresponding functionality to TeX). See Bentley, ``Programming Pearls: Little Languages'', CACM, August 1986, V29, N8, page 711, for detailed discussion - I have used up enough net bandwidth already, and Bentley gets the ideas across better than I might. The founders of SoftQuad, like the troff software, had a long history of experience with phototypesetters, which are the machines then used by most commercial printers. By contrast, TeX appeared to be primarily oriented towards raster printers (300 dpi laser printers in particular) for which it could download CM fonts. At that time, the CM fonts were, uh, not as well-formed as they are today. We needed to get good quality letter forms; TeX did not produce them in the quality needed, and appeared to be wired in to use of downloading CM fonts. While TeX did have kerning, that too depended on the raster fonts; to drive phototypesetting machines, we needed the ability not only to set type using manufacturer's fonts without downloading CM, but to kern those existing fonts. To my *limited* understanding, this could only be done by building TFM files (or whatever) for those fonts. It seemed at least as easy to slightly modify ditroff's font.OUT files as it would have been to build TFM files from scratch (not using Metafont79). Also, TeX was written in a slightly-non-standard dialect of Pascal, rather than in WEB, so there were issues of portability to consider (recall that the early UNIX TeX tapes - in circulation until quite recently - could only go to UNIX-source-licensed sites because they contained modifications to the Pascal compiler needed to make that version of TeX compile). Troff by contrast was known to run on many flavors of UNIX, and was written in fairly portable C. Of course today's TeX runs on about the same range of systems as Troff does, so portability is no longer an issue. One desirable property of ditroff's intermediate language is that it is amenable to ``postprocessors'' other than those for specific devices. For example, you might want to use grep, awk, etc., on the intermediate language. Clearly one could hack up TeX to print readable DVI files, but then it wouldn't be TeX anymore. We hacked up ditroff to print more-readable intermediate files, and it isn't ditroff anymore - hence that product is called SQtroff. We have backwards compatibility with all previous versions of troff (including a filter in our standard software that generates ditroff-compatible intermediate language from our format, so a user with existing ditroff postprocessors can continue to use them with our SQtroff). The decision to use ditroff instead of TeX was made in 1983 (before I even thought of coming to work for SoftQuad). Some of the reasons are no longer applicable, but most of them are. We would probably make the same decision today. Ian F. Darwin, Director, Research & Development, SoftQuad, Inc., Toronto, Canada i...@sq.com, i...@sq.uucp, utzoo!sq!ian