This page contains numerous resources for people using troff. My thanks to the Computing Sciences Research Group at Bell Labs for making PostScript copies of so many of their reports available.

Note that the raw troff input for the document set that came with the Seventh Edition release Unix (aka Unix Version 7, dated 1979) is now available. Thanks again to Bell Labs for making this available.

troff

• Groff. This is the GNU troff package (groff), written by James J. Clark. It includes implementations of troff, eqn, pic, refer, and tbl. The current version is 1.11a.

  Can you imagine anyone rewriting troff from scratch, in what ended up as about 60,000 lines of C++? Wow, I am impressed. If it were not for James' freely available reimplementation, troff would be dead by now.

• Troff User's Manual by Jospeh F. Ossanna and Brian W. Kernighan, revised November 1992. This is the definitive guide to all troff commands. GNU's gtroff adds numerous capabilities to troff and these enhancements are described in the gtroff man page.

• A TROFF Tutorial by Brian W. Kernighan, August 4, 1978. This is a wonderful tutorial on how to use raw troff.

• A Typesetter-independent TROFF by Brian W. Kernighan, revised March 1992. This describes the changes made to troff to make it typesetter independent. The details are only of interest to people writing troff postprocessors for new devices, but the historical details are interesting.

tbl

• Tbl--A Program to Format Tables by M. E. Lesk, June 11, 1976, revised August 5, 1977. This is the original tbl user's manual.

eqn

• Typesetting Mathematics -- User's Guide (Second Edition) by Brian W. Kernighan and Lorinda L. Cherry, August 15, 1978. This is the eqn user's manual.

• A System for Typesetting Mathematics by Brian W. Kernighan and Lorinda L. Cherry, 1975. This paper is a revision of a paper originally published in CACM, March 1975.

pic

• PIC-A Graphics Language for Typesetting, User Manual by Brian W. Kernighan, revised May 1991. This is the pic user's manual. I use this all the time. GNU's gpic adds numerous capabilities to pic (alignment of text with arrows, and the like) and these enhancements are described in the gpic man page.

• Making Pictures with GNU PIC by Eric S. Raymond, August 1995. This is an update of the generic pic user's manual, for GNU pic. This manual was distributed with version 1.11 of groff.

• Examples of picMacros. This 7-page PostScript document contains examples of the pic macros that I use when writing my books. This file contains all the pic macros that I use for my books.

• Turning PIC Into HTML. I wanted to include some pic figures into an HTML document and spent quite a few hours figuring out how to do this. Here is my summary.

Macros

• Typing Documents on the UNIX System: Using the -ms Macros with Troff and Nroff by M. E. Lesk, November 13, 1978.

grap

• Grap-A Language for Typesetting Graphs, Tutorial and User Manual by Jon L. Bentley and Brian W. Kernighan, revised May 1991. This is the grap program, which unfortunately, has not been implemented with groff.

• Prag is a simple grap replacement, written in awk, by Holger Meyer.

Indexing

• Tools for Printing Indexes by Jon L. Bentley and Brian W. Kernighan, October 1986. These tools work with troff's output to handle lots of the details involved in producing an index. I use these tools for all my books, as described here.

  Here are the shell scripts and awk scripts described in this paper.

refer

• Some Applications of Inverted Indexes on the UNIX System by M. E. Lesk, June 21, 1978. This describes both the files used by refer and the format of the input files used to maintain publication lists.