[greenyoda]

> I like to believe they hand formatted the ASCII back then

That thesis is from 1989. There were plenty of ASCII text formatting tools available back then, such as "nroff"[1] on Unix, which dates back to 1972. We weren't formatting hundred-page documents by hand.

(The RUNOFF program that nroff was based on was first released in 1964.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nroff

[keepamovin]

Wow, I always thought this stuff was done by hand. I had no idea! Yeah, I recently discovered how to turn these old ascii docs into PDFs and page images in a way that preserves their beautiful formatting, using LaTeX:

    input_file="my_file_downloaded_from_textfiles.txt"
      cat <<TAO > "file.tex"
    \documentclass{article}
    \usepackage[left=2cm,right=1cm,top=2cm,bottom=2cm]{geometry} % Adjust the global margin
    \usepackage{listings}
    \usepackage{beramono}
    \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

    \lstset{%
      language={},%
      basicstyle=\ttfamily,%
      linewidth=19cm,%
      breaklines=true,%
      breakatwhitespace=false,%
      texcl=false,%
      literate={\\\}{{\textbackslash}}1
    }

    \begin{document}
    \pagestyle{empty}  % Remove page numbers

    \lstinputlisting{"$input_file"}

    \end{document}
    TAO

I put it into a project here: https://github.com/dosyago/chai