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# Groff

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According to Wikipedia:

  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/UTF8 for display at the terminal. Formatting commands may be either low-level typesetting requests (“primitives”) or macros from a supplied set. Users may also write their own macros. All three may be combined. Using groff may be a solid alternative to TeX Live due to small size and native language.

## Installation

You may find groff already installed on your system as it is a dependency of the base-devel package. Otherwise install it as usual.

### Package documentation

Detailed documentation and usage examples are available in groff(1) or its Info document groff.

You can also access the documentation at https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/groff.html#documentation.

## Usage

Groff is a powerful and yet lightweight easy to use system.

You can see an example of document created with `-me` macros, however, groff has several built-in macros as well.

You may be interested in using `ms` for not complicated tasks or `mom` to produce scientific papers. See groff_ms(7) and groff_mom(7).

See the following resources for feature information:

- The Groff and Friends HOWTO
- Creating Documents in Groff or LaTeX
- Mom macros examples

## Tips and tricks

### Adding support for cyrillic fonts

If you see inappropriate symbols when outputting documents with cyrillic fonts to ps or pdf, take the following steps:

- Download type1 fonts with cyrillic support (for example from gs-type1_koi8_fonts.tgz Arial, Times, Courier)
- Place your cyrillic type1 fonts into `/usr/share/fonts/gsfonts` — this is default folder for ghostscript to find fonts
- Create a copy of the original file before changing it:

     cd /usr/share/ghostscript/YOUR_VERSION/Resource/Init/
     cp Fontmap.GS Fontmap.GS.backup

- Change ghostscript fontmap file to associate default fonts with cyrillic ones, using '%' to comment lines with default associations. Add new aliases, as follows:

    /usr/share/ghostscript/YOUR_VERSION/Resource/Init/Fontmap.GS

    %/Times-Roman /NimbusRoman-Regular ;
     /Times-Roman  /TimesNRCyrMT ;
     /TimesNRCyrMT (times8.pfb) ;

Where '(times8.pfb)' is a name of your copied type1 font.

- From now on you can prepend your default groff command with iconv prefix to print cyrillic symbols in ps files:

    $ iconv -f utf-8 -t koi8-r test.ms | groff -ms -Tps > test.ps && ps2pdf test.ps test.pdf

### Correctly display Polish diacritics

To display Polish diacritics:

    $ groff -Kutf8 -Tdvi -mec -ms test.ms > test.dvi
    $ dvipdfm -cz 9 test.dvi

## See also

- Groff parser and template engines for Rails
- Mom macros
- Mom macros full manual

Category:

- Applications