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
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*
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.
i could use feedback on this.
while i reproduce a lot of things in somewhat embarassingly close detail, one thing i am not at all wedded to is the IMHO atrocious typesetting of tables in the original programmer's guide.
i'm confident this one, for instance, does not need internal vertical rules. in fact, no vertical rules at all?
pesco
paulrickards