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Comment by kleiba | Hacker News Reader

Amazingly, judging from the font rendering, it seems that this book was written in MS Word?!

The text mentions troff and PIC. I wonder whether the author still has the source code... Even if re-rendering with modern tools ("modern" meaning "actually runs on platforms readily available today, e.g. groff and gpic") is more work than he’s willing to put in (which I quite understand), there ought to be someone on the Internet who is enough of a compsci/typography nerd to do it...

> I was able to reconstruct them from the original troff source using plain MS Word.

Also if you look into PDF properties it states the same.

I know nothing about typography, so could you share which aspects of the type specifically stood out to you as bad typography?

The fact that it uses Times New Roman gives it a very (old) "MS Word" vibe.

In addition, the text is 'justified', but there's not a single hyphenation.

That's what Word does. And it looks a bit ugly. It's probably worse than just going with left-alignment.

Word actually supports automatic hyphenation, but you have to turn it on (it’s a property of paragraph styles IIRC).

Thanks! I heard of that.

Of course, in practice approximately no one ever does that.

It is being done in business environments where people actually care how documents look like. It may be a small portion of Word usage overall, but it isn't totally rare either.

Oh, definitely. Microsoft likely put that feature in because there was some demand for it from some important enough customers.

troff, but MS Word was available from 1983.

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