Re: Nils-Peter Nelson, sqtroff, and groff history

[Steve Izma]

On Tue, Dec 13, 2022 at 06:29:19PM -0600, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> Subject: Nils-Peter Nelson, sqtroff, and groff history

> Some people might find the following messages, first from Nils-Peter
> Nelson and then Liam R. E. Quin, of interest.  They're posts from 1996
> to the comp.text USENET group.  (Je me souviens, DejaNews!)

I'll try adding a couple of other related, possibly interesting
items.

> At any rate, SoftQuad continued to develop sqtroff for several
> years. The SoftQuad version has kerning, long character names,
> long macro, register, string and special character names, and
> an ASCII intermediate format that's moderately readable and
> amenable to awk/perl/sed.

As Liam implies later, sqtroff had a very useful (albeit
extremely verbose) trace option, unlike anything in groff. I miss
it.

> I think it was in 1988 that I discovered that James Clark was
> working on groff, and pressured SoftQuad, who very kindly sent
> him a manual for the then latest sqtroff. As a result, groff is
> fairly compatible with sqtroff 2.9.1, the then shipping
> version.

Question (if this ever gets to Liam, who I think is living
somewhere in eastern Ontario): who pressured who? At first I
thought that this means that Liam pressured SoftQuad to help
James Clark, but this also could have the opposite meaning. I
clearly remember hearing from SoftQuad's chief programmer, David
Slocombe, that there was significant sharing of concepts in this
relationship. SoftQuad had done a huge amount development work on
the source code, which I sure saved James much effort. I remember
David telling me once how he'd spent an entire weekend rewriting
tbl, since he was unhappy with some of its core algorithms.

> Today, you can use groff on linux (which was what the original
> poster asked for, I think), and sqtroff on most commercial Unix
> platforms.
> 
> I don't believe we could sell you source for sqtroff, because
> of the complexities of whatever remains of our arrangement with
> AT&T.

At some point during my time with Mortice Kern Systems (better
known as MKS), I helped negotiate the licensing of the SoftQuad
code for a port to Windows. This was probably around 1987. MKS
successfully sold this product until 1994 or thereabouts. By that
time I was working at Wilfrid Laurier University Press. We
probably started using the Windows version of sqtroff in the late
1980s and then switched to the SoftQuad Unix version in the early
1990s when we were able to afford a 386-based Unix system. We
used that on hundreds of projects (mostly academic books and
journals) until switching over to groff around 1998. After that
we used groff for many more books and journals, until we got to
the point where the only people who could be hired were so
entrenched in WYSIWYG that the Unix paradigm was beyond them.

I continued to use groff for complex technical academic texts and
for some administrative documents until I retired from WLU Press
in 2015.

> One was sqtroff, and this was best for people who had
> PostScript printers and/or wanted to develop their own macros.
> It used (back then) to have some problems with -me and -ms,
> because it derived from the AT&T version, where -mm was used
> most.
> ...
> On balance, we used to sell sqtroff to people developing macros,

I found that none of the supplied tmac packages were suitable for
the complexities of our academic work, so I started writing my
own macros as soon as I got a copy of sqtroff. SoftQuad provided
lots of examples of custom macro sets, and these were of a very
different style than ms and me, etc. The style was heavily
influenced by XML, so that macros usually operated on blocks of
text, with matched opening and closing macros, e.g., 

.pp((
text ...
.pp))

> I've been using sqtroff recently together with David
> Megginson's NSGMLS.pm to typeset a book from SGML.

A number of Canadian publishers used sqtroff during the 1990s,
largely because they either employed or contracted people who
were friends of the SoftQuad people (e.g., McClelland & Stewart),
or else because they were involved in co-operative efforst with
SoftQuad (Coach House Press, Porcupine's Quill -- who still use
groff on a high-quality 1990s Linotron phototypesetter). Besides
my work at WLU Press, I've used both sqtroff and groff on scores
of books I've typeset for Between The Lines, a publishing
co-operative I helped to start up in 1977.

> Our (SQ's) income from sqtroff is negligible at this point as
> far as I know.

By the early 1990s I had the impression that SoftQuad was making
most of its money doing custom documentation for the U.S.
military and large corporations. They weren't happy about that,
but their financial circumstances were difficult. As Liam says,
their SGML and XML editors and tools later became more important.

        -- Steve

-- 
Steve Izma
-
Home: 35 Locust St., Kitchener, Ontario, Canada  N2H 1W6
E-mail: sizma@golden.net  phone: 519-745-1313
cell (text only; not frequently checked): 519-998-2684

==
The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best – and
therefore never scrutinize or question.
    -- Stephen Jay Gould, *Full House: The Spread of Excellence
       from Plato to Darwin*, 1996