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Old 9th November 2008
DrJ DrJ is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: Gold Country, CA
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Troff was closed and there were no real alternatives at the time for typesetting while the old gold standards were scraped by publishers due to the cost.
A few random comments before this thread is split off, which it really should be.

While troff was closed, AT&T was rather liberal with academic licenses. Stanford undoubtedly had the source. It would hinder its wide-spread propagation, though that may not have mattered much to Knuth initially. My guess is that he looked at the troff source, and found areas where he could improve the product, such as the spacing and line-break algorithms.

You also have to remember where the industry was in those days. troff and its many preprocessors was the practical justification that was used to develop Unix originally. KSRs were still very common, and being displaced slowly by terminals. The PDP 7 and 11 were considered to be very powerful computers. These days we have more computing power in our cell phones.

Move forward a few years into the late 1970s and early 1980s, and you are in the era of CP/M 8-bit machines. Wordstar was king (though I used the EMACS- and Scribe-like editor-formatter Final Word). Eight-pin dot matrix printers were the most common (yuk!); there were some daisy wheel and rotating ball printers that had extended character sets but they were really costly (like over $2K). The majority of scientific and technical document processing was done on Wang stand-alone word processors.

On the other end of the spectrum were the dedicated phototypesetters. These usually ran on minicomputers, used proprietary software, and drove the phototype output device. The output form was photographic paper; resolutions were extremely high (on the order of 6000 dpi) and the type was absolutely beautiful. My wife at the time was a typographical proofreader and typesetter, and it was through her that I originally got into type.

The output from troff was limited to a single typesetter (Berkeley had one which I used) and the troff output type, while quite good, fell terribly far short of what could be done with dedicated systems. There simply was not enough attention given to character spacing (kerning), typographical "nicities" like ligatures, interword spacing and use of thousands and thousands of type families, and their corresponding weights, in condensed and expanded faces, and in faces (like italic).

While extremely capable as a technical document production system, troff was a pretty crude typesetter when compared with the professional systems.

That's the context into which Knuth started TeX. It is no wonder that he thought he could do better -- there were many areas where improvement was possible. At the same time, he was undoubtedly influenced greatly by troff, which you can see in how it handles mathematics. Personally, I think the troff preprocessor eqn is one of the most brilliant pieces of software ever written.

Incidentally, type these days has taken a terrible turn for the worse. There simply is no replacement for phototype -- it is simply stunningly beautiful. You really should try to find a galley on photographic paper produced by a first-rate system. There is nothing like it.

At the same time, the word processors uniformly turn out ugly type. MS Word, for example, in spite of the alleged sophistication of its many internal algorithms, produces profoundly ugly type. I can always tell when someone has written a document in it. Both troff and TeX produce type that is worlds better. But even those pale in comparison with the old dedicated systems. These, alas, are pretty much dead. Typography has never really recovered from the introduction of the personal computer. And I count that as a great shame.

The upside is that for a few hundred dollars (including an inexpensive laser printer), one can use troff or TeX to produce documents that are pretty good. They are much, much better than documents produced by the old Wang (or even scientific typewriters!) and so they are much more accessible to the general user. Sadly, those users tend to use Word or its equivalents, which really have no place for anything beyond a simple memo. That is, if one places any value in the appearance of type.

Sorry for the length of the post, but this is an area near to my heart, as you can probably tell.
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