David Slocombe
David Slocombe is a Canadian publisher and software author.[1][2][3][4] Slocombe's early interest in the UNIX operating system was triggered by the Kernighan and P.J. Plauger's Software Tools. In 1974, while working at Coach House Press, Slocombe and his colleagues started to work with typesetting software.
Prior to his work in publishing and software development, Slocombe worked in the News industry, at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and the Globe and Mail.[5] Remarkably, Slocombe had not formal training in computer programming.
Influence of UNIX on Slocombe's programming career[edit]
Slocombe's early work in computer typography was a preprocessor, inspired by the ratfor preprocessor described in Kernighan and Plauger's 1974 book Software Tools.[6]
Kernighan and Plauger were part of the small pool of research programmers at Bell Labs that developed the early versions of the UNIX system.[6] In their 1974 book they described the early UNIX programming philosophy, by showing the development of a series of programs. Their examples were written in ratfor, and the book contained the source code a reader could use to implement a ratfor preprocessor on their own system.
Ratfor programs look very similar to programs written in the C programming language, and it was used by innovative programmers in the years prior to the widespread availability of C compilers.[6] The ratfor preprocessor converted the easier to read ratfor statements into statements in standard Fortran.
Inspired by ratfor Slocombe wrote a preprocessor that allowed the input of simpler and easier to understand and remember macros that would emit the commands to drive typesetting machines.[6][7]
Sqtroff[edit]
By the early 1980s Slocombe had written an improved version of troff, the typesetting program originally written for Bell Labs UNIX systems.[1][3][8]
Slocombe and Coach House colleagues Yuri Rubinsky, Stan Bevington and Ed Hale would later spin off a new company, SoftQuad, that marketed a series of successful publishing software products, including, SoftQuad Troff (SQTROFF)), HotMetal. Slocombe was Vice President of Research and Development.[3]
Later career[edit]
In 1986 Quill and Quire described Slocombe as "one of the rare people equally at home with both literature and technology."[4]
Slocombe left SoftQuad in the late 1990s and became a consultant for Tata Infotech, a prominent Indian software firm.
References[edit]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1
John Maxwell (2013-09-09). "Coach House Press: Crucible of Electronic Publishing Technology". Historical Perspectives on Canadian Publishing. Archived from the original on 2014-07-14. Retrieved 2015-05-05.
Once the computer could talk to the phototypesetting unit, work began in earnest on software. Programmer David Slocombe worked over several years on the development of a software environment, based on a recursive macro processor, for editors and typesetters preparing text files for high-quality printing. His work paralleled the early development of generalized markup at IBM.
- ↑
Iva Cheung (2012-03-31). "Coach House Press as a digital pioneer". Archived from the original on 2015-05-05. Retrieved 2013-10-26.
At this point, the software became key in the process. David Slocombe at Coach House tinkered with the software and got it to the point where it was usable by the editors themselves.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2
John W. Maxwell. "Early Unix Culture at Coach House Press" (PDF). Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2012-10-24. Retrieved 2015-05-05.
Always an innovator in the way he ran the printing operation, Bevington became acquainted in 1972 with Professor Ron Baecker, who ran the Dynamic Graphics Project at the University of Toronto (U of T). Bevington and Baecker, along with Baecker's grad student David Tilbrook, programmer David Slocombe of the Globe and Mail, and Ed Hale from Mono Lino Typesetting began exploring the state of the art of computer-driven typesetting.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1
" ". Quill and Quire, volume 52. 1986. Retrieved 2015-05-05.
...degrees in both English and philosophy, eight years of study in industrial engineering, and 16 years as a Globe and Mail reporter under his belt David Slocombe was one of the rare people equally at home with both literature and technology.
- ↑
"Coach House Press in the 'Early Digital' Period: A Celebration". Simon Fraser University. 2015-12-31. Archived from the original on 2024-05-14. Retrieved 2025-02-08.
The group included Stan, and an ex-CBC producer and Globe and Mail employee David Slocombe, who was a self-taught programmer. The group also included Ed Hale, who was an engineering student at Waterloo and a member of the Dumont Press Collective, a group formed to handle the production needs of alternative presses in Ontario.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3
John W. Maxwell. "Early Unix Culture at Coach House Press" (PDF). Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2024-07-29. Retrieved 2025-02-08.
Unix concepts preceded real UNIX at Coach House. In the late 1970s, Unix and C were unavailable to Coach House programmer David Slocombe on the Datapoint 2200. The bridge came from Kernighan & Plauger’s book Software Tools, which inspired Slocombe to create his own preprocessor, not for Fortran but for the 2200’s 8008 assembler. Based on the preprocessor, Slocombe next created a recursive macro processor that became a typesetting language for driving the Mergenthaler V-I-P. The macro processor’s syntax was influenced by contemporary developments in GenCode and (S)GML by Charles Goldfarb at IBM, which they had seen at a GCA conference.
line feed character in|quote=at position 631 (help) - ↑
Stan Bevington (2009-12-02). "Coaching Print". Maple Tree Literary Supplement (27). Retrieved 2025-02-08.
At Coach House, we decided to put little codes with brackets around them and then our in-house programmer David Slocombe made a little smart chunk of software called a macro processor that translated the tags into codes needed for the particular typesetting machine at the time, specialized codes. So the macro processor at the time was revolutionary.
- ↑
"Coach House Press: Crucible of Electronic Publishing Technology". Digital Collections @ McMaster University. 1987-02-06. Archived from the original on 2019-04-21. Retrieved 2025-02-08.
David Slocombe's work at Coach House in the early 1980s further extended the troff package such that a significant amount of troff development was happening in Toronto. In 1984, with the goal of making troff into a typesetting tool capable of passing muster with professional printers (by providing kerning, hyphenation and justification), Bevington, Slocombe, Patrick Dempster, and the writer/impresario Yuri Rubinsky spun off a new company, SoftQuad, to develop and market an enhanced version called sqtroff.