What are macros in Unix?
A macro is a collection of troff primitives or requests. In this chapter, the man macro package (used to format the man, or manual, pages in the UNIX system) is examined and used as an example for other macro packages.
Is troff still used?
At the same time, the summer of 1969, Doug McIlroy rewrote roff in BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language by Martin Richards, 1966), extending and simplifying it at the same time. It was McIlroys version that first Joe Ossanna and, after his death, Brian Kernighan turned into the troff we still use.
What is groff used for?
Groff is basically used to create man pages. But its functionality is not limited to creating man pages, rather it acts as a formatting and typesetting engine. It acts as a compiler for the input supplied to it and it creates a formatted document as its output.
What is Groff Linux?
groff (GNU roff) is a typesetting system that reads plain text input files that include formatting commands to produce output in PostScript, PDF, HTML, or DVI formats or for display to a terminal. Formatting commands can be low-level typesetting primitives, macros from a supplied package, or user-defined macros.
What is the use of nroff and Troff?
The nroff and troff commands format text for printing by interspersing the text with control sequences. Control sequences are either control line requests or escape requests that control text processing by the printing device.
What is nroff command in Unix?
Nroff, or new roff, is a Unix OS text-formatting program that produces output for terminal windows and fixed-width printers. It is used to format manual pages and is an integral Unix help system component.
What is troff Linux?
Description. The troff command reads one or more files and formats the text for printing on a phototypesetter or comparable device. A postprocessor is then required to post process the output of the troff command to the target device.
What is troff used for?
troff features commands to designate fonts, spacing, paragraphs, margins, footnotes and more. Unlike many other text formatters, troff can position characters arbitrarily on a page, even overlapping them, and has a fully programmable input language.
What are MS macro packages in Unix?
The ms macro package is designed to help you format letters, proposals, memos, technical papers, and reports. For simple documents such as letters, ms offers few advantages to the basic format requests described in Chapter 4.
Is Groff still used?
A reimplementation and extension of the typesetter from ATT Unix, groff is present on most POSIX systems owing to its long association with Unix manuals (including man pages).
