This section presents the intermediate output generated from the
same input for three different devices. The input is the
sentence hell world fed into groff
on the command line.
• High-resolution device ps
shell> echo "hell world" | groff -Z -T ps
x T ps
x res 72000 1 1
x init
p1
x font 5 TR
f5
s10000
V12000
H72000
thell
wh2500
tw
H96620
torld
n12000 0
x trailer
V792000
x stop
This output can be fed into the postprocessor grops(1) to get its
representation as a PostScript file, or gropdf(1) to output
directly to PDF.
• Low-resolution device latin1
This is similar to the high-resolution device except that the
positioning is done at a minor scale. Some comments (lines
starting with #) were added for clarification; they were not
generated by the formatter.
shell>
"hell world" | groff -Z -T latin1
# prologue
x T latin1
x res 240 24 40
x init
# begin a new page
p1
# font setup
x font 1 R
f1
s10
# initial positioning on the page
V40
H0
# write text 'hell'
thell
# inform about a space, and do it by a horizontal jump
wh24
# write text 'world'
tworld
# announce line break, but do nothing because ...
n40 0
# ... the end of the document has been reached
x trailer
V2640
x stop
This output can be fed into the postprocessor grotty(1) to get a
formatted text document.
• Classical style output
As a computer monitor has a very low resolution compared to
modern printers the intermediate output for the X devices can
use the jump-and-write command with its 2-digit displacements.
shell>
"hell world" | groff -Z -T X100
x T X100
x res 100 1 1
x init
p1
x font 5 TR
f5
s10
V16
H100
# write text with old-style jump-and-write command
ch07e07l03lw06w11o07r05l03dh7
n16 0
x trailer
V1100
x stop
This output can be fed into the postprocessor xditview
(1x) or
gxditview
(1) for displaying in X.
Due to the obsolete jump-and-write command, the text clusters in
the classical output are almost unreadable.