I now remember correponding briefly with Ralf Rekoendt about the TeX
system back then.
Yes, I still have the disks from Tony Tebby with TeX and MetaFont sources
in C. He once wanted to convert that for SMSQ (a very long time ago he
also wanted to write a C2SB converter....never done...perhaps?).
Maybe we all remember the days, when he has written the "QJump Newsletter"
or personal letters with "qplq", a kind of typesetting program similar to
TeX, written in SuperBASIC only for the Epson LQ 1xxx and Epson LQ 2xxx
series. It e.g. allows to print l+r justified with proportional font ,
tabs etc. and that was not possible with any kind of program for the QL in
the 80's (except text87, but that was very much later). Text was just
written ad hoc in an editor and typesetted with control codes á la "\xxx"
to justify at will, very similar to TeX.
Unfortunately, qplq was one of Tony's "inhouse" programs, which never saw
the light of day. I have written a wman GUI for that with QPTR many years
ago and Tony allowed me to release it to the Public Domain, which I
haven't done for unknown reasons. Should be a good idea to send it to
Dilwyn 8-) (but I think....he should have it, even he should have a lot of
letters from me printed with that).
I still use this program under SMSQE with Marcel's print program (BTW
thanks to Marcel to correct a small but very important bug in qplq.).
Cheers...Ralf
A very interesting reply. And yes, I'd be happy to add it to my website if
Ralf wishes. I never had a copy of the system from Ralf AFAIK, but I did
receive many letters from Ralf in the 1980s, which I know were done with Tex
or a Tex-like system, because I remember he mentioned it several times.
I've sent a summary of the replies to Terry in Australia to see if this jogs
his memory about the system he was using back then.
--
Dilwyn Jones
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