nroff (short for "new roff") is a text-formatting program on Unix and

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X, *nix 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 Uni ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

s. It produces output suitable for simple fixed-width printers and terminal windows. It is an integral part of the Unix help system, being used to format man pages for display. nroff and the related

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 (software), roff. Whil ...

were both developed from the original roff. While nroff was intended to produce output on terminals and line printers, troff was intended to produce output on

typesetting Typesetting is the composition of text for publication, display, or distribution by means of arranging physical ''type'' (or ''sort'') in mechanical systems or '' glyphs'' in digital systems representing '' characters'' (letters and other ...

systems. Both used the same underlying markup and a single source file could normally be used by nroff or troff without change.

History

nroff was written by

Joe Ossanna Joseph Frank Ossanna, Jr. (December 10, 1928 – November 28, 1977) was an American electrical engineer and computer programmer who worked as a member of the technical staff at the Bell Labs, Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jer ...

for Version 2 Unix, in

Assembly language In computing, assembly language (alternatively assembler language or symbolic machine code), often referred to simply as assembly and commonly abbreviated as ASM or asm, is any low-level programming language with a very strong correspondence bet ...

and then ported to C. It was a descendant of the RUNOFF program from CTSS, the first computerized text-formatting program, and is a predecessor of the Unix

document processing system.

Variants

There is also a

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

version of nroff in the groff package emulating the AT&T version, widely used by Unix-like operating systems. The Minix operating system, among others, uses a clone of nroff called cawf by Vic Abell, based on awf, the Amazingly Workable Formatter designed in awk by Henry Spencer. These are not full replacements for the nroff/troff suite of tools, but are sufficient for display and printing of basic documents and

manual page A man page (short for manual page) is a form of software documentation found on Unix and Unix-like operating systems. Topics covered include programs, system libraries, system calls, and sometimes local system details. The local host administra ...

s. In addition, a simplified version of nroff is available in

Ratfor Ratfor (short for ''Rational Fortran'') is a programming language implemented as a preprocessor for Fortran#FORTRAN 66, Fortran 66. It provides Structured programming, modern control structures, unavailable in Fortran 66, to replace GOTOs and sta ...

source code form as an example in the book ''Software Tools'' by

Brian Kernighan Brian Wilson Kernighan (; born January 30, 1942) is a Canadian computer scientist. He worked at Bell Labs and contributed to the development of Unix alongside Unix creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. Kernighan's name became widely known ...

and P. J. Plauger.

References

External links

source code for Henry Spencer's AWF

nroff source code
in

Illumos Illumos (stylized as "illumos") is a partly free and open-source Unix operating system. It has been developed since 2010 and is based on OpenSolaris, after the discontinuation of that product by Oracle. It comprises a kernel, device driver ...

Explanation
by Bryan Cantrill Troff Assembly language software Markup languages Unix text processing utilities {{unix-stub

History

Variants

See also

References

External links