Nroff

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.

See also

* Troff

External links

* [http://www.netadmintools.com/html/7roff.man.html roff - Concepts and history of roff typesetting]
* [http://www.isc.org/index.pl?/sources/utils/text/awf.php source code for Henry Spencer's AWF]
* [http://kbs.cs.tu-berlin.de/~jutta/ms/troff.html troff/nroff quick reference]
* [http://www.fnal.gov/docs/products/ups/ReferenceManual/html/manpages.html Introduction to creating and formatting man pages]