Troff Permanence

You can download the troff source of Brian Kernighan’s UNIX for Beginners - Second Edition from the Plan 9 archive of the 7th Edition Unix documentation. The Plan 9 people re-packaged the various files as bun archives probably sometime in the 1990s, but you can extract the troff input files and run them through GNU groff today, in the 21^st Century.

Once you download beginners.bun, you can create modern, printable output like this:

$ sh < beginners.bun
$ ls -l
beginners.bun
u0
u1
u2
u3
u4
u5
u.mac
$ cat u.mac u? | groff -Tpdf -ms > beginners.pdf
s.tmac:<standard input>:58: error: sorry, .MH not implemented
s.tmac:<standard input>:64: error: sorry, .UX not implemented

You get a couple of incomprehensible error messages, and a very printable PDF file.

I found both .MH and .UX macros in the Heirloom doctools source code. Back in the day, .MH expanded to “Murray Hill, New Jersey 07974”, and .UX expanded to UNIX in small caps. I think those two macros used to be part of the MS macro package. The GNU people seem to have deliberately left them out.

I realize that Microsoft Word is immortal, but it appears that a .doc file from 1981 would be beyond the limit of backwards compatibility of modern “Office 365”. Unix for beginners - Second Edition was released with 7^th Edition Unix in 1979. The first edition dates to 1974, 7 years before Word 1.0.

I did the above on a laptop running an up-to-date Arch Linux installation in August of 2026. Is it my imagination or does bun archive format resemble the old shar archives we used to post to Usenet newsgroups? In any case, troff is forever.