nroff
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This article does not cite any references or sources. (June 2011) |
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.
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History [edit]
nroff was written by Joe Ossanna in 1973, in Assembly language 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 troff document processing system.
There is also a free software version of nroff in the groff package.
Variants [edit]
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.
See also [edit]
External links [edit]
- roff - Concepts and history of roff typesetting
- source code for Henry Spencer's AWF
- troff/nroff quick reference
- Introduction to creating and formatting man pages
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