Update: Once I’ve become used to it, I feel more productive writing troff with -ms than (La)TeX. Do give troff a fair shot.

Weather update: I went back to this. I checked what caused the issues in heirloom troff. My installation directory was fairly lengthy ($HOME/local/heirloom-doctools), which ended up causing callhunt() being called with /home/xorhash/local/heirloom-doctools/lib/reftools/papers/Ind and other excessively long paths, which caused the “abuff too long” errors. Things work after shortening the installation path

Pipeline:
export TROFFMACS=macros/tmac.
refer -p Rv7man.fixed -e p* | tbl | troff -ms | dpost | ps2pdf > x.ps && ps2pdf x.ps LEARN-Computer-Aided_Instruction_on_UNIX-heirloom-troff.pdf && rm x.ps

This is the Result:

Great job, it’s interesting to see the actual pipeline for creating the typeset documents from the late 1970’s although I’d rather use MS Word 1.1 on OS/2 in CGA than go through that kind of hell.

So I thought to myself “sure, let’s try it”. It was a bitch to install but then I realized that, actually, I skimmed mk.config too quickly and it made sense, though the defaults are wacky. I guess that’s for the nice vintage feel of old code.

Results: I’m glad I didn’t go that route. refer straight up does nothing, failing with either “abuff not big enough 53” or segfaulting, not passing Go, not collecting $200. Fixing this would probably require some source code patches and more details where and how it chokes. This happens even with a significantly shortened bibliography.

Leaving refer out of the pipeline, the bundled tmac.s with heirloom troff almost works: It has .UX footnotes and indeed only one of them (in the abstract), but it also has way too much line spacing. However, the abstract overflows with the dead citations for some reason. Using the the tmac.s from the website linked in the article yields reasonable results with only path modifications (to fix up the includes with .so).

tmac.s not needing actual changes was very nice, but hunting down the issues with refer might’ve left me with much more work on my hands. I respect the work that went into the heirloom doctools, though I do wonder when the last commit even happened.