Groff (software)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Groff is the GNU replacement for the troff and nroff text formatters. It is an original implementation written primarily in C++ by James Clark and is modeled after ditroff, including many extensions. The first version, 0.3.1, was released June 1990. The first stable version, 1.04, was announced in November 1991. Groff was developed as free software to provide an easily-obtained replacement for the standard AT&T troff/nroff package, which at the time was proprietary, and was not always available even on branded UNIX systems.

Groff contains a large number of helper programs, preprocessors, and postprocessors including eqn, tbl, pic and soelim. There are also several macro packages included that duplicate, expand on the capabilities of, or outright replace the standard troff macro packages.

Groff development of new features is active, and is an important part of free, open source, and UNIX derived operating systems such as GNU+Linux and 4.4BSD derivatives - notably because troff macros are used to create man pages, a type of documentation used for core parts of these operating systems.

Until fairly recently, O'Reilly and Associates was one publisher that relied heavily on groff for its page layout and workflow, a fact noted in the colophons of many of its books. (Current books are mostly done in a combination of Adobe FrameMaker and QuarkXPress.)

[edit] See also

• TeX
• Desktop publishing

[edit] External links

• Groff homepage
• Groff Forum - hosted by Nabble archiving Groff mailing list into a searchable forum.
• troff.org gives background and examples of troff, including the GNU roff implementation.
• Groff wiki