3 ms·

I love how text is formatted in these documents. It shows a level of attention and care I don’t see often in modern markup/HTML/Word/Pages pipelines. Maybe it i

• greenyoda 3y ago
  > I like to believe they hand formatted the ASCII back then That thesis is from 1989. There were plenty of ASCII text formatting tools available back then, such as "nroff"[1] on Unix, which dates back to 1972. We weren't formatting hundred-page documents by hand. (The RUNOFF program that nroff was based on was first released in 1964.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nroff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nroff
  • keepamovin 3y ago
    Wow, I always thought this stuff was done by hand. I had no idea! Yeah, I recently discovered how to turn these old ascii docs into PDFs and page images in a way that preserves their beautiful formatting, using LaTeX: input_file="my_file_downloaded_from_textfiles.txt" cat <<TAO > "file.tex" \documentclass{article} \usepackage[left=2cm,right=1cm,top=2cm,bottom=2cm]{geometry} % Adjust the global margin \usepackage{listings} \usepackage{beramono} \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} \lstset{% language={},% basicstyle=\ttfamily,% linewidth=19cm,% breaklines=true,% breakatwhitespace=false,% texcl=false,% literate={\\\}{{\textbackslash}}1 } \begin{document} \pagestyle{empty} % Remove page numbers \lstinputlisting{"$input_file"} \end{document} TAO I put it into a project here: https://github.com/dosyago/chai https://github.com/dosyago/chai