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kragen • yesterday at 8:31 PM • 0 replies • view on HN

troff is no longer fashionable, and it's not what you want for top-quality typesetting, but I don't think of it as "out there". My non-technical mother was using an HDOS program called TEXT.ABS, which is similar to a limited nroff, to format the articles she wrote in the 01980s. It wasn't as easy to use as something like MacWrite, but it was a lot easier than a typewriter. The text editor she used was called PIE.ABS, and from my point of view, the usability distance from a typewriter to PIE was bigger than from PIE to MacWrite.

She didn't have much choice of fonts on the pre-Graftrax Epson MX-80 she used. I think it was Pica or Elite.

Typesetting is certainly very satisfying, but it's not essential to writing.