Groff (software)

Groff is the GNU implementation of troff, a typesetting system that was developed by AT & T for the Unix operating system. On many UNIX and GNU -based systems used to display instructions for use groff ( man pages ).

History

The first 1990 freigebenene version 0.3.1 has been implemented by James Clark within the GNU project largely in C . Followed in 1991 with version 1.04, the first stable version. 1999 took over Werner Lemberg and Ted Harding further care.

The new implementation has been made to avoid copyright problems with the old, proprietary code.

Groff is continually evolving.

Differences with AT & T troff

On compatibility utmost attention was paid during development. Differences are documented in the man page groff_diff (7).

The ditroff intermediate format was maintained, but with some extensions. There are, among others, drivers for PostScript, PCL, and DVI available. Likewise, direct HTML is generated.

Nroff produces formatted text files where it can also embed codes for the terminal control to represent typefaces such as bold, italic, or colored text to corresponding terminals. In addition, it dominates the output of multiple character sets

Since most troff commands are extremely primitive, are in some so-called groff macro packages. There are, for example, the packets Mom, Me, Mm and Ms for documents, Doc and man for man pages. These are also loaded accordingly when calling groff on the command line.