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   groff    ( 7 )

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