refer is a program for managing bibliographic references, and citing them in
troff
troff (), short for "typesetter roff", is the major component of a document processing system developed by Bell Labs for the Unix operating system. troff and the related nroff were both developed from the original roff.
While nroff was inte ...
,
nroff
nroff (short for "new roff") is a text-formatting program on Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It produces output suitable for simple fixed-width printers and terminal windows. It is an integral part of the Unix help system, being used t ...
, and
groff documents. It is implemented as a
preprocessor
In computer science, a preprocessor (or precompiler) is a program that processes its input data to produce output that is used as input in another program. The output is said to be a preprocessed form of the input data, which is often used by s ...
.
refer was written by
Mike Lesk
Michael E. Lesk (born 1945) is an American computer scientist.
Biography
In the 1960s, Michael Lesk worked for the SMART Information Retrieval System project, wrote much of its retrieval code and did many of the retrieval experiments, as well as ...
at
Bell Laboratories
Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984),
then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996)
and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007),
is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mul ...
[Michael Lesk. Some applications of inverted indexes on the Unix system. In ''UNIX Programmer's manual: Supplementary Documents'', volume 2. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, seventh edition, 1982. Also available onlin]
/ref>Unix-like
A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X or *nix) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-li ...
operating systems. A free reimplementation exists as part of the groff package.
, refer sees little use, primarily because troff itself is not used much for longer technical writing that might need software support for reference and citation management. , some reference management software
Reference management software, citation management software, or bibliographic management software is software for scho