nroff
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
nroff (short for "new roff") is a Unix text-formatting program; 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.
It was a descendant of the RUNOFF program from CTSS, the first computerized text-formatting program, and is a predecessor of the Unix troff document processing system.
There is also a free software version of nroff in the groff package.
nroff was written by Joe Ossanna.
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 pages.
In addition, a simplified version of nroff is available in Ratfor source code form as an example in the book Software Tools by Brian Kernighan and P.J. Plauger.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- roff - Concepts and history of roff typesetting
- source code for Henry Spencer's AWF
- troff/nroff quick reference (broken link - 12-17-2009)
- Introduction to creating and formatting man pages
 |
This Plan 9 from Bell Labs related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
 |
This Unix-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
