Native groff Options¶

The following options either do not exist for troff or are differently interpreted by groff.

-D arg

Set default input encoding used by preconv to arg. Implies -k.

-e

Preprocess with eqn.

-g

Preprocess with grn.

-G

Preprocess with grap. Implies -p.

-h

--help

Print a help message.

-I dir

This option may be used to specify a directory to search for files (both those on the command line and those named in .psbb and .so requests, and \X'ps: import' , \X'ps: file' and \X'pdf: pdfpic' escapes). The current directory is always searched first. This option may be specified more than once; the directories are searched in the order specified. No directory search is performed for files specified using an absolute path. This option implies the -s option.

-j

Preprocess with chem. Implies -p.

-k

Preprocess with preconv. This is run before any other preprocessor. Please refer to preconv's manual page for its behaviour if no -K (or -D) option is specified.

-K arg

Set input encoding used by preconv to arg. Implies -k.

-l

Send the output to a spooler program for printing. The command that should be used for this is specified by the print command in the device description file, see groff_font(5). If this command is not present, the output is piped into the lpr(1) program by default. See options -L and -X.

-L arg

Pass arg to the spooler program. Several arguments should be passed with a separate -L option each. Note that groff does not prepend ‘-’ (a minus sign) to arg before passing it to the spooler program.

-N

Don't allow newlines within eqn delimiters. This is the same as the -N option in eqn.

-p

Preprocess with pic.

-P -option

-P -option -P arg

Pass -option or -option arg to the postprocessor. The option must be specified with the necessary preceding minus sign(s) ‘-’ or ‘--’ because groff does not prepend any dashes before passing it to the postprocessor. For example, to pass a title to the gxditview postprocessor, the shell command

is equivalent to

-R

Preprocess with refer. No mechanism is provided for passing arguments to refer because most refer options have equivalent language elements that can be specified within the document. See refer(1) for more details.

-s

Preprocess with soelim.

-S

Safer mode. Pass the -S option to pic and disable the following troff requests: .open, .opena, .pso, .sy, and .pi. For security reasons, safer mode is enabled by default.

-t

Preprocess with tbl.

-T dev

Set output device to dev. For this device, troff generates the intermediate output; see groff_out(5). Then groff calls a postprocessor to convert troff's intermediate output to its final format. Real devices in groff are

For the following TTY output devices (postprocessor is always grotty), -T selects the output encoding:

The following arguments select gxditview as the ‘postprocessor’ (it is rather a viewing program):

The default device is ps.

-U

Unsafe mode. Reverts to the (old) unsafe behaviour; see option -S.

-v

--version

Output version information of groff and of all programs that are run by it; that is, the given command line is parsed in the usual way, passing -v to all subprograms.

-V

Output the pipeline that would be run by groff (as a wrapper program) on the standard output, but do not execute it. If given more than once, the commands are both printed on the standard error and run.

-X

Use gxditview instead of using the usual postprocessor to (pre)view a document. The printing spooler behavior as outlined with options -l and -L is carried over to gxditview(1) by determining an argument for the -printCommand option of gxditview(1). This sets the default Print action and the corresponding menu entry to that value. -X only produces good results with -Tps, -TX75, -TX75-12, -TX100, and -TX100-12. The default resolution for previewing -Tps output is 75dpi; this can be changed by passing the -resolution option to gxditview, for example

-z

Suppress output generated by troff. Only error messages are printed.

-Z

Do not automatically postprocess groff intermediate output in the usual manner. This will cause the troff output to appear on standard output, replacing the usual postprocessor output; see groff_out(5).

Transparent Options¶

The following options are transparently handed over to the formatter program troff that is called by groff subsequently. These options are described in more detail in troff(1).

-a

ASCII approximation of output.

-b

Backtrace on error or warning.

-c

Disable color output. Please consult the grotty(1) man page for more details.

-C

Enable compatibility mode.

-d cs

-d name=s

Define string.

-E

Disable troff error messages.

-f fam

Set default font family.

-F dir

Set path for device DESC files.

-i

Process standard input after the specified input files.

-m name

Include macro file name.tmac (or tmac.name); see also groff_tmac(5).

-M dir

Path for macro files.

-n num

Number the first page num.

-o list

Output only pages in list.

-r cn

-r name=n

Set number register.

-w name

Enable warning name. See troff(1) for names.

-W name

disable warning name. See troff(1) for names.

Paper Size¶

The virtual paper size used by troff to format the input is controlled globally with the requests .po, .pl, and .ll. See groff_tmac(5) for the ‘papersize’ macro package which provides a convenient interface.

The physical paper size, giving the actual dimensions of the paper sheets, is controlled by output devices like grops with the command-line options -p and -l. See groff_font(5) and the man pages of the output devices for more details. groff uses the command-line option -P to pass options to output devices; for example, the following selects A4 paper in landscape orientation for the PS device:

groff -Tps -P-pa4 -P-l ...
    

Front-ends¶

The groff program is a wrapper around the troff(1) program. It allows one to specify the preprocessors by command-line options and automatically runs the postprocessor that is appropriate for the selected device. Doing so, the sometimes tedious piping mechanism of classical roff(7) can be avoided.

The grog(1) program can be used for guessing the correct groff command line to format a file.

The groffer(1) program is an all-around viewer for groff files and man pages.

Preprocessors¶

The groff preprocessors are reimplementations of the classical preprocessors with moderate extensions. The standard preprocessors distributed with the groff package are

eqn(1)

for mathematical formulae,

grn(1)

for including gremlin(1) pictures,

pic(1)

for drawing diagrams,

chem(1)

for chemical structure diagrams,

refer(1)

for bibliographic references,

soelim(1)

for including macro files from standard locations,

and

tbl(1)

for tables.

A new preprocessor not available in classical troff is preconv(1) which converts various input encodings to something groff can understand. It is always run first before any other preprocessor.

Besides these, there are some internal preprocessors that are automatically run with some devices. These aren't visible to the user.

Macro Packages¶

Macro packages can be included by option -m. The groff system implements and extends all classical macro packages in a compatible way and adds some packages of its own. Actually, the following macro packages come with groff:

man

The traditional man page format; see groff_man(7). It can be specified on the command line as -man or -m man.

mandoc

The general package for man pages; it automatically recognizes whether the documents uses the man or the mdoc format and branches to the corresponding macro package. It can be specified on the command line as -mandoc or -m mandoc.

mdoc

The BSD-style man page format; see groff_mdoc(7). It can be specified on the command line as -mdoc or -m mdoc.

me

The classical me document format; see groff_me(7). It can be specified on the command line as -me or -m me.

mm

The classical mm document format; see groff_mm(7). It can be specified on the command line as -mm or -m mm.

ms

The classical ms document format; see groff_ms(7). It can be specified on the command line as -ms or -m ms.

www

HTML-like macros for inclusion in arbitrary groff documents; see groff_www(7).

Details on the naming of macro files and their placement can be found in groff_tmac(5); this man page also documents some other, minor auxiliary macro packages not mentioned here.

Programming Language¶

General concepts common to all roff programming languages are described in roff(7).

The groff extensions to the classical troff language are documented in groff_diff(7).

An overview of language features, including all supported escapes and requests, can be found in groff(7).

Formatters¶

The central roff formatter within the groff system is troff(1). It provides the features of both the classical troff and nroff, as well as the groff extensions. The command-line option -C switches troff into compatibility mode which tries to emulate classical roff as much as possible.

There is a shell script nroff(1) that emulates the behavior of classical nroff. It tries to automatically select the proper output encoding, according to the current locale.

The formatter program generates intermediate output; see groff_out(7).

Devices¶

In roff, the output targets are called devices. A device can be a piece of hardware, e.g., a printer, or a software file format. A device is specified by the option -T. The groff devices are as follows.

ascii

Text output using the ascii(7) character set.

cp1047

Text output using the EBCDIC code page IBM cp1047 (e.g., OS/390 Unix).

dvi

TeX DVI format.

html

HTML output.

latin1

Text output using the ISO Latin-1 (ISO 8859-1) character set; see iso_8859_1(7).

lbp

Output for Canon CAPSL printers (LBP-4 and LBP-8 series laser printers).

lj4

HP LaserJet4-compatible (or other PCL5-compatible) printers.

ps

PostScript output; suitable for printers and previewers like gv(1).

pdf

PDF files; suitable for viewing with tools such as evince(1) and okular(1).

utf8

Text output using the Unicode (ISO 10646) character set with UTF-8 encoding; see unicode(7).

xhtml

XHTML output.

X75

75dpi X Window System output suitable for the previewers xditview(1x) and gxditview(1). A variant for a 12pt document base font is X75-12.

X100

100dpi X Window System output suitable for the previewers xditview(1x) and gxditview(1). A variant for a 12pt document base font is X100-12.

The postprocessor to be used for a device is specified by the postpro command in the device description file; see groff_font(5). This can be overridden with the -X option.

The default device is ps.

Postprocessors¶

groff provides 3 hardware postprocessors:

grolbp(1)

for some Canon printers,

grolj4(1)

for printers compatible to the HP LaserJet 4 and PCL5,

grotty(1)

for text output using various encodings, e.g., on text-oriented terminals or line printers.

Today, most printing or drawing hardware is handled by the operating system, by device drivers, or by software interfaces, usually accepting PostScript. Consequently, there isn't an urgent need for more hardware device postprocessors.

The groff software devices for conversion into other document file formats are

grodvi(1)

for the DVI format,

grohtml(1)

for HTML and XHTML formats,

grops(1)

for PostScript.

gropdf(1)

for PDF.

Combined with the many existing free conversion tools this should be sufficient to convert a troff document into virtually any existing data format.

Utilities¶

The following utility programs around groff are available.

addftinfo(1)

Add information to troff font description files for use with groff.

afmtodit(1)

Create font description files for PostScript device.

eqn2graph(1)

Convert an eqn image into a cropped image.

gdiffmk(1)

Mark differences between groff, nroff, or troff files.

grap2graph(1)

Convert a grap diagram into a cropped bitmap image.

groffer(1)

General viewer program for groff files and man pages.

gxditview(1)

The groff X viewer, the GNU version of xditview.

hpftodit(1)

Create font description files for lj4 device.

indxbib(1)

Make inverted index for bibliographic databases.

lkbib(1)

Search bibliographic databases.

lookbib(1)

Interactively search bibliographic databases.

pdfroff(1)

Create PDF documents using groff.

pfbtops(1)

Translate a PostScript font in .pfb format to ASCII.

pic2graph(1)

Convert a pic diagram into a cropped image.

tfmtodit(1)

Create font description files for TeX DVI device.

xditview(1x)

roff viewer historically distributed with the X Window System.

xtotroff(1)

Convert X font metrics into GNU troff font metrics.

groff Macro Directory¶

This contains all information related to macro packages. Note that more than a single directory is searched for those files as documented in groff_tmac(5). For the groff installation corresponding to this document, it is located at /usr/share/groff/1.22.4/tmac. The following files contained in the groff macro directory have a special meaning:

troffrc

Initialization file for troff. This is interpreted by troff before reading the macro sets and any input.

troffrc-end

Final startup file for troff. It is parsed after all macro sets have been read.

name.tmac

tmac.name

Macro file for macro package name.

groff Font Directory¶

This contains all information related to output devices. Note that more than a single directory is searched for those files; see troff(1). For the groff installation corresponding to this document, it is located at /usr/share/groff/1.22.4/font. The following files contained in the groff font directory have a special meaning:

devname/DESC

Device description file for device name, see groff_font(5).

devname/F

Font file for font F of device name.