done! still haven't decided whether to add the "prison bars" or not. but managed to replicate the original's page and line breaks pretty exactly. this needed just a few tweaks here and there.

i had a choice to make here: arrange it so that every item ends up in the same place on the same page as in the original, even if a bunch of it doesn't make any sense?
i decided to do so. the benefit would be that someone familiar with the original table (which i am guessing is a few people), for all its terrible layout, would not be confused by looking at a different table that would still have had pretty bad layout.

so any changes made to the table cannot change the relative positions of things, unless or until i rebuild the whole damn thing as part of a (hypothecial) larger effort.

there are a few errata items that can be fixed without changing the layout. not in this first edition, though. keeping all the typos and stuff, so i can make a clean diff just for them.

#troff #typesetting #c64

not far now, 13 pages to go.

#c64 #troff #typesetting

got the rotated text done yesterday. bah, it was difficult! and I don't even really know why. it's not a standard feature of #troff, so one has to inject some raw postscript in there. this should all be simple, but aww, there were some weird interactions. yet i made it, it works, so there.

also did the proof-reading on these latest parts, found a few small mistakes. i still need to do one (easier) table, and then i'm done with the first major part of the chapter, ca. 50 pages, 40%.

i think i'll actually print that out and try binding it into a booklet, as a trial.

#typesetting #c64 #assembly #retrocomputing

some nice progress. i've made it into the instruction tables. they are full of quirky stuff, just look at those little devils...

took a bit to set up the macros for things, but after that it got pretty nice to work with. now of course i have about 12 pages more of this to type, and they have some new weirdness in them... *sigh*

#troff #typesetting #c64 #assembly

yup. i guess we're (i am) doing this. at least until i run out of steam.

my aim for the moment is this chapter, which has ~120 pages and a bunch of uniform tables/data. i guess i've made it 10% of the way already. :v

right now i'm working in a tic-toc fashion: rough out some pages in an ad-hoc way to find out what i need, then clean things up introducing macros etc., then repeat.

#troff #typesetting #commodore #c64 #assembly #neoretrocomputing