roff typesetting: groff, troff, etc.

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"Groff (GNU troff) is a typesetting system that reads plain text mixed with formatting commands and produces formatted output. Output may be PostScript or PDF, html, or ASCII/UTF-8 for display at the terminal. Present on most Unix systems owing to its long association with Unix manuals (manpages), groff is capable of producing typographically sophisticated documents while consuming only minimal system resources." -- from GNU

(link: https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/)

Feel free to ask questions about the roff family and its many macros! Interested in learning more? Type man groff or info groff into your terminal to read the documentation. A good macro to start with is the ms macro!

Note: you may have to install groff using your package manager for its full capabilities, as many GNU+Linux distributions only ship with the base package used in manpages.

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Community Poll: What do you use *roff for? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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As stated above, I am curious to know how groff fits into people's lives. Do you write manpages, only take notes with it, prefer it to LaTeX andor ConTeXt for text formatting, or something else entirely? Which macros do you use, if any? Let me know!

As for me, I encountered groff after already learning LaTeX, but I instantly appreciated its concise commands and began using it to take biology notes with the simple -me macro. I'm slowly expanding my usage to encompass math and graphing with eqn and grap, respectively. My needs are not always met by -me as of late, so a macro switch is in order. GNU seems most inclined to continue work on -mom, so I'll likely switch over to that soon enough.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I can't write whole document with groff at work since most of my documents are edited by multiple people :( however I do most of my pictures with PIC :D

On your point about macro packages, ms me and mm are still developed (see https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2023-07/msg00051.html) but mom has a dedicated very active author and maintainer (Peter Schaffter) so that's why it can seems like it is being developed faster.