Photocomposition techniques can be used to solve some of the problems of typesetting mathematics. A phototypesetter is a device which exposes a piece of photographic paper or film, placing characters wherever they are wanted. The Graphic Systems phototypesetter[2] on the UNIX operating system[3] works by shining light through a character stencil. The character is made the right size by lenses, and the light beam directed by fiber optics to the desired place on a piece of photographic paper. The exposed paper is developed and typically used in some form of photo-offset reproduction.
On UNIX, the phototypesetter is driven by a formatting program called TROFF [4]. TROFF was designed for setting running text. It also provides all of the facilities that one needs for doing mathematics, such as arbitrary horizontal and vertical motions, line-drawing, size changing, but the syntax for describing these special operations is difficult to learn, and difficult even for experienced users to type correctly.
For this reason we decided to use TROFF as an ``assembly language,'' by designing a language for describing mathematical expressions, and compiling it into TROFF.