This is a collection of notes and references related to my Words and Words 2 postings on Enoch's Thoughts.
It seemed like it had been a long time since I posted anything, so I decided to review my recent posting history.
Almost one a month (OK, .67/month) - not as bad as I was thinking, especially if you consider the mind-numbing length of a few of them.
AT&T Research has produced a great flow-chart-generating program called Graphviz. See http://www.graphviz.org.
Source: Umich.
You can save time and money at the service bureau division of your print shop, and make your life easier, if you prepare your files well and according to the print industry's specifications. The five most popular desktop publishing packages — Adobe PageMaker, Adobe InDesign, QuarkXPress, Adobe FrameMaker, and Corel VENTURA — can help you do that.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG.
Bravo, a document preparation program for the Alto produced at Xerox PARC by Butler Lampson, Charles Simonyi and colleagues in 1974, is generally considered the first program to incorporate WYSIWYG technology, displaying text with formatting (e.g. with justification, fonts, and proportional spacing of characters). The Alto monitor (72 pixels per inch) was designed so that one full page of text could be seen and then printed on the first laser printers. When the text was laid out on the screen 72 PPI font metric files were used, but when printed 300 PPI files were used—thus one would occasionally find characters and words slightly off, a problem that continues to this day. (72 PPI came from a new measure of 72 "PostScript points" per inch. Prior to this, the standard measure of 72.27 points per inch was used in typeface design, graphic design, typesetting and printing.)
Bravo was never released commercially, but the software eventually included in the Xerox Star can be seen as a direct descendant of it.[5]
In parallel with but independent of the work at Xerox PARC, Hewlett Packard developed and released in late 1978 the first commercial WYSIWYG software application for producing overhead slides or what today are called presentation graphics. The first release, named BRUNO (after an HP sales training puppet), ran on the HP 1000 minicomputer taking advantage of HP's first bitmapped computer terminal the HP 2640. BRUNO was then ported to the HP-3000 and re-released as "HP Draw".
In the 1970s and early 1980s, most popular home computers lacked the sophisticated graphics capabilities necessary to display WYSIWYG documents, meaning that such applications were usually confined to limited-purpose, high-end workstations (such as the IBM Displaywriter System) that were too expensive for the general public to afford. Towards the mid 1980s, however, things began to change. Improving technology allowed the production of cheaper bitmapped displays, and WYSIWYG software started to appear for more popular computers, including LisaWrite for the Apple Lisa, released in 1983, and MacWrite for the Apple Macintosh, released in 1984.
The Apple Macintosh system was originally designed so that the screen resolution and the resolution of the ImageWriter dot-matrix printers sold by Apple were easily scaled: 72 PPI for the screen and 144 DPI for the printers. Thus, the scale and dimensions of the on-screen display in programs such as MacWrite and MacPaint were easily translated to the printed output—if the paper were held up to the screen, the printed image would be the same size as the on screen image, but at a higher resolution. As the ImageWriter was the only model of printer physically compatible with the Macintosh printer port, this created an effective, closed system. Later, when Macs using external displays became available, the resolution was fixed to the size of the screen to achieve 72dpi. These resolutions often differed from the VGA-standard resolutions common in the PC world at the time. Thus, while a Macintosh 14" monitor had the same 640x480 resolution as a PC, a 16" screen would be fixed at 832x624 rather than the 800x600 resolution used by PCs. With the introduction of third-party dot-matrix printers as well as laser printers and multisync monitors, resolutions deviated from even multiples of the screen resolution, making true WYSIWYG harder to achieve.
from wikipedia typesetting: "The first commercially successful laser imagesetter, able to make use of a raster image processor was the Monotype Lasercomp. ECRM, Compugraphic (later purchased by Agfa) and others rapidly followed suit with machines of their own. Early minicomputer-based typesetting software introduced in the 1970s and early 1980s, such as Datalogics Pager, Penta, Atex, Miles 33, Xyvision, troff from Bell Labs, and IBM's Script product with CRT terminals, were better able to drive these electromechanical devices, and used text markup languages to describe type and other page formatting information. The descendants of these text markup languages include SGML, XML and HTML."
I was fortunate enough to get to work n a PDP11/45 in the early 70s. But I didn't realize at the time how critical word processing was even then. (quote from roff)
Superior Steel's TRS 80 word processor.
Source: http://www.netadmintools.com/html/7roff.man.html
Wikipedia roff entry: roff was the first Unix text-formatting computer program, the most important application run on the first machine specifically purchased to run UNIX[citation needed], and a predecessor of the nroff and troff document processing systems. It was a Unix version of the runoff text-formatting program from Multics, which was a descendant of RUNOFF for CTSS (the first computerized text-formatting application). The first UNIX version was a transliteration of the BCPL version of runoff into PDP-7 assembly, for the prototype UNIX on the PDP-7, circa 1970. When the first PDP-11 was acquired for UNIX in late 1970 (a PDP-11/20), the justification cited to management for the funding required was that it was to be used as a word processing system, and so roff was quickly transliterated again, into PDP-11 assembly, in 1971. Dennis Ritchie notes that the ability to rapidly modify roff (because it was locally written software) to provide special features needed by the Bell Labs Patent department was an important factor in leading to the adoption of UNIX by the Patent department to fill their word processing needs. This in turn gave UNIX enough credibility inside Bell Labs to secure the funding to purchase one of the first PDP-11/45s produced; it was on that machine that UNIX evolved into the system that later took the computer science world by storm.
Source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_perfect
Ctrl characters, white space, tab, pipe!, bang, splat, hash, hat, squiggle, curly bracket, brace, square bracket
Source: http://kb.iu.edu/data/acux.html
"In Windows, lines end with both the line feed and carriage return ASCII characters, but Unix uses only a line feed. As a consequence, some Windows applications will not show the line breaks in Unix-format files. Likewise, Unix programs may display the carriage returns in Windows text files with Ctrl-m ( ^M ) characters at the end of each line."
This link also explains some handy ways to convert files between the two formats.
Editors: vi, emacs, terminal, notepad, BBE, iPad Notes, variations, (quick replace, find and replace ctrl characters, entering ctrl characters.
"Window" size, 80 char x 25 lines
Console vs windows
CR, LF, EOL, ctrlM ctrlJ, CtrlL, visual break versus break in thought (para) eg BBE handling either, emacs and "soft return" backslash.
Search for two eols, replace with pipe,
Uses of backslash, slash, colon. OS file and dir/folder spec, HTML file/folder spec
Visible Codes eg WP, ROFF, troff, eroff
Markup language
Proprietary solutions
Rich text - bold, italic, underline, font size, color
HTML, sgml, XML,