In case anyone has copy they'd like to typeset as monospace plain text, I made a tool to do this recently. If you might find it useful, feel free to play with it at https://monotext.pages.dev/
Pub getting attention made my day. I wondered how everyone forgot about it and how no one ever mentioned that it actually gave birth to TeX and Web. Good job hacker news
troff (1972) and eqn (1974) also existed. I don't know if they were influenced by PUB. SCRIPT (1968)[1] had macros but it's unclear whether they were present at the beginning or added later. RUNOFF (ancestor of troff) doesn't appear to have had macros. I've heard that Forth documentation was produced using a formatter written in Forth, that let the user switch between documet text and Forth code, but idk the dates or specific for this.
Anyway I'm sure PUB was influential but the idea of markup languages with macros certainly wasn't unique to it.
I actually came across this manual two months ago and studied it in deep. Your comment was greatly appreciated, I will research all of them. Thank you!
Larry was a worldly guy with wide-ranging interests. Were you thinking that if he knew about The Garden of Earthly Delights he wouldn't have chosen a woodcut of a pub for the PUB manual? Bosch has been thought of as a heretic [1] and that could have been part of the appeal for Larry, who pushed against orthodoxies throughout his career.
You’re allowed to think what you like (personally I’m going for an inventive mind, potentially helped by mushrooms or ergot); my point was that a Georgian woodcut circa 1810 is unlikely to be from Bosch (1450 – 1516).
Ahh! That totally did not come through in your earlier comment. I'm sorry I jumped to the conclusion that you were trying to police my art appreciation. That sort of thing really grates on my nerves.
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