GNU Troff Info

This is a collection of information about GNU Troff. The software itself is available at any number of GNU archive sites. I was working on the GNU Troff Manual (texinfo source), but I was unable to get any further. In the meantime, here are some other resources:

The comp.text FAQ has some useful information about troff.

troffcvt -- troff-to-XXX Conversion Software.

Unroff is a Scheme-based, programmable, extensible troff translator with a back-end for the Hypertext Markup Language.

Daniel Quinlan has written troff2html a "troff" to HTML conversion program written in Perl. Supports the "-mm" and "-ms" macro sets.

Michael Haardt has written an improved deroff program (for removing troff constructs from a file)

Bell Labs has several Troff papers available here

• Nroff/Troff User's Manual By J. F. Ossanna (local copy)
• A Typesetter-Independent TROFF By B. W. Kernighan (local copy)
• IDEAL User's Manual By C. J. Van Wyk (local copy). This has no free implemtation, but has some interesting ideas.
• GRAP - A Language for Typesetting Graphs (Tutorial and User Manual) By Jon L. Bentley and Brian W. Kernighan (local copy). Again, there is no GNU version of this, but there is a free nawk script called prag which implements a subset.
• PIC -- A Graphics Language for Typesetting (Revised User Manual) By Brian W. Kernighan (local copy)
• CHEM -- A Program for Typesetting Chemical Structure Diagrams, Computers and Chemistry By J. L. Bentley, L. W. Jelinski and B. W. Kernighan (local copy). The software is available (as a compressed shar file) ftp://netlib.att.com/netlib/typesetting/chem.Z
• Tools for Printing Indexes by J.L. Bentley and B.W. Kernighan (local copy)

There are also several books out about troff:

• The BSD manuals have the papers related to troff in the User's Supplementary Documents.
• Text Processing and Typesetting with UNIX By D.W. Baron and M.J. Rees
• Unix Nroff/Troff: A User's Guide by Kevin P. Roddy. 1987. ISBN 0-03-000167-6 Holt, Rinehart and Winston
• there are more but I can't remember them right now

Partly as an exercise for me to learn more troff, I wrote a macro package for formating overhead slides for presentations. It is a fairly spartan package, but has some neat features, including vertical centering, and postscript frames around each page.