Groff ( ) (also called GNU troff) is a typesetting system that creates formatted output when given plain text mixed with formatting commands. It is the
GNU
GNU () is an extensive collection of free software (383 packages as of January 2022), which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operat ...
replacement for the
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 ...
and
nroff text formatters.
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
Linux and 4.4
BSD
The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berke ...
derivatives — notably because troff macros are used to create
man pages, the standard form of documentation on Unix and Unix-like systems.
OpenBSD has replaced groff with
mandoc
mandoc (historically called mdocml) is a utility used for formatting man pages in BSD Operating Systems (e.g. NetBSD), specifically those written in the ''mdoc'' and ''man'' macro languages. Unlike the groff and older troff and nroff tools that ...
in the base install, since their 4.9 release. Also
macOS Ventura
macOS Ventura (version 13) is the nineteenth and current major release of macOS, Apple's desktop operating system for Mac computers. The successor to macOS Monterey, it was announced at WWDC 2022 on June 6, 2022, and launched on October 24, 20 ...
.
History
groff is an original implementation written primarily in
C++
C, or c, is the third letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''cee'' (pronounced ), plural ''cees''.
History
"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. In 1999, Werner Lemberg and Ted Harding took over maintenance of groff. The current version of groff is 1.22.4,
released on .
See also
*
TeX
Tex may refer to:
People and fictional characters
* Tex (nickname), a list of people and fictional characters with the nickname
* Joe Tex (1933–1982), stage name of American soul singer Joseph Arrington Jr.
Entertainment
* ''Tex'', the Italian ...
*
Desktop publishing
Notes
References
External links
*
groff mailing list archive(searchable)
hosted b
Nabble archiving the groff mailing list into a searchable forum (sadly none of the emails are visible today).
* gives background and examples of troff, including the GNU roff implementation.
{{GNU
GNU Project software
groff
Free typesetting software