[HN Gopher] Recreated sources for the book "UNIX Text Processing...
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Recreated sources for the book "UNIX Text Processing," published in
1987
Author : rdpintqogeogsaa
Score : 108 points
Date : 2022-02-19 12:35 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| jgtrosh wrote:
| The archive.org [1] page has a preformatted version and more
| info.
|
| [1]: https://archive.org/details/utp_book/page/n3/mode/2up
| yesenadam wrote:
| Thanks. Link for the complete PDF book, from that page:
| https://archive.org/download/utp_book/utp_book.pdf
| bombcar wrote:
| Most people assume UNIX typesetting was always just TeX - but
| troff and friends was probably more widespread at the time.
| Tor3 wrote:
| The book I learned writing networking code from, Steven's "Unix
| Network Programming"
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_Network_Programming) was
| typeset in troff. The first edition (1990) at least. The later
| ones aren't I think. Stevens passed away in 1999. I recall
| coming across many other books which mentioned "troff" in the
| introduction back then.
| srvmshr wrote:
| "The Unix Programming Environment" & "The C programming
| language" (K & R) were also written in troff.
| timClicks wrote:
| IIRC UNIX was supported by Bell Labs because of troff. They
| needed a type setting system.
| bear8642 wrote:
| Thought that was more how they convinced management to buy
| PDP11 saying we'll make typesetting software for patent
| department?
| Aloha wrote:
| This is great. I've long had a paper copy on my bookshelf.
|
| I did notice when building this on OSX changing the makefile to
| call env to get groff and awk is required to work with homebrew.
|
| I did submit an issue on the github about this however.
| jll29 wrote:
| /usr/bin/groff -Tpdf -P-pletter -step -ms -z -rpdf:bm.nr=1
| -rRef=0 -dPDF.EXPORT=1 utp_book.t 2>&1 | grep '^.ds' |
| /usr/bin/groff -Tpdf -P-pletter -step -ms -rRef=0 - utp_book.t
| >utp_book.pdf.tmp /usr/bin/groff: can't find `DESC' file
| /usr/bin/groff:fatal error: invalid device `pdf' make: **
| [utp_book.pdf] Error 3
|
| Just replace -Tpdf by -Tps in Makefile and run ps2pdf manually
| afterwards, then it works.
| elvis70 wrote:
| Previous discussion about this book (2012):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4902595
| 2b3a51 wrote:
| Just had to try running this on Slackware 15 with the groff that
| is part of the install. The git source has a hardwired path to
| ghostscript/9.53.3/..some font. Just symlinked to the 9.55.0
| present in Slackware and there we are, a pdf file, with some
| warnings about bookmarks and a table with zero width spacing.
| Impressive work.
|
| Thanks to those responsible for this both for the book _and_ for
| an example of how to produce a book with groff using the ms
| macros.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| I kept my resume in troff from maybe late 80s until early 2017.
| troff is really weird, a genuinely different kind of text
| formatting. The fact that something as commonplace as text
| formatting can have such divergent methods as troff, lout and TeX
| has kept me looking for things like different pattern matching,
| something not at all like regular expressions.
| jll29 wrote:
| You could look at an XML publishing pipeline (XML + XSLT + XML-
| FO).
| Someone wrote:
| There's lex (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_(software)) and
| parser generators such as yacc
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yacc).
|
| And what do you find weird in troff? I see it as an early
| markdown, or rather, markdown as yet another take on runoff
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TYPSET_and_RUNOFF). Markdown is
| a bit more implicit and (unless you 'escape' out of it using
| html) has fewer features, but I don't see it as that different.
| jmclnx wrote:
| I actually have that book :) I thought it was very informative.
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(page generated 2022-02-19 23:00 UTC)