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by HarryHirsch 2104 days ago
Back in the day we had engineers writing documents from markup. We called them typesetters. It was a qualified job, you don't expect the task to be something Joe Random could to with 6 weeks of training.
3 comments

> Back in the day we had engineers writing documents from markup.

Back in the day secretaries were creating electronic documents with troff and nroff:

> The first version of Unix was developed on a PDP-7 which was sitting around Bell Labs. In 1971 the developers wanted to get a PDP-11 for further work on the operating system. In order to justify the cost for this system, they proposed that they would implement a document-formatting system for the Bell Labs patents department[1]. This first formatting program was a reimplementation of McIllroy's roff, written by Joe F. Ossanna.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troff

OP, here. It's not that long ago, I've used troff myself. Or maybe it was that long ago, but it just seems like yesterday.
Back in the days operating a computer also needed weeks of training and was a qualified job. That doesn't mean it always has to stay that way.
At risk of gatekeeping, it doesn’t sound like typesetters merit the title of engineer.
That's because it wasn't.