справочник по языку GNU roff (GNU roff language reference)
Имя (Name)
groff - GNU roff language reference
Описание (Description)
The name groff stands for GNU roff and is the free implementation
of the roff type-setting system. See roff(7) for a survey and
the background of the groff system.
This document provides only short descriptions of roff language
elements. Groff: The GNU Implementation of troff, by Trent A.
Fisher and Werner Lemberg, is the primary groff manual, and is
written in Texinfo. You can browse it interactively with 'info
groff'.
Historically, the roff language was called troff. groff is
compatible with the classical system and provides proper
extensions. So in GNU, the terms roff, troff, and groff language
could be used as synonyms. However troff slightly tends to refer
more to the classical aspects, whereas groff emphasizes the GNU
extensions, and roff is the general term for the language.
The general syntax for writing groff documents is relatively
easy, but writing extensions to the roff language can be a bit
harder.
The roff language is line-oriented. There are only two kinds of
lines, control lines and text lines. The control lines start
with a control character, by default a period '.' or a single
quote '''; all other lines are text lines.
Control lines represent commands, optionally with arguments.
They have the following syntax. The leading control character
can be followed by a command name; arguments, if any, are
separated by spaces (but not tab characters) from the command
name and among themselves, for example,
.command_name arg1 arg2
For indentation, any number of space or tab characters can be
inserted between the leading control character and the command
name, but the control character must be on the first position of
the line.
Text lines represent the parts that is printed. They can be
modified by escape sequences, which are recognized by a leading
backslash '\'. These are in-line or even in-word formatting
elements or functions. Some of these take arguments separated by
single quotes ''', others are regulated by a length encoding
introduced by an open parenthesis '(' or enclosed in brackets '['
and ']'.
groff
