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[bug #65101] [mdoc] topics in "Name" section set in roman since 1.23.0


From: G. Branden Robinson
Subject: [bug #65101] [mdoc] topics in "Name" section set in roman since 1.23.0
Date: Wed, 5 Jun 2024 01:54:50 -0400 (EDT)

Follow-up Comment #6, bug #65101 (group groff):

Earlier in the discussion, I said:

> To be honest, I'm not sure Ossanna troff was ever ported to the VAX, so I'm
not sure what the CSRG used to set their manuals.

It most certainly was, as part of Unix/32V.  Reiser and London of AT&T
documented this effort in their paper "A UNIX(TM) Operating System for the DEC
VAX-11/780 Computer".

https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/otherports/32vscan.pdf

They even singled out _troff_ for complaint, though they didn't savage it as
badly as they did the Bourne shell.

"The source code for the document preparation and phototypesetter commands is
not portable; several weeks were required to produce properly running version
[sic] of these commands.  Use of the explicit (or worse, implicit) constant
"2" instead of sizeof(int) was quite common.  The code assumes that variables
which [recte: that] are adjacent in external declarations occupy contiguous
memory at execution time.  Several tables are initialized by assembly-language
programs.  Converting the tables was merely tedious; changing the code which
[recte: that] thought it knew the format of an a.out file required some
effort.  This memorandum was created using the converted nroff/troff programs
on the VAX-11/780."

I had read that paper before but apparently managed to forget much of its
content.  I hope that keying this in will help me to be a better *roff
historian in the future.


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