NAME | DESCRIPTION | AUTHORS | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON |
|
DITROFF(7) Miscellaneous Information Manual DITROFF(7)
ditroff - classical device-independent roff
The name ditroff once marked a development level of the troff text processing system. In actual roff(7) systems, the name troff is used as a synonym for ditroff. The first roff system was written by Joe Ossanna around 1973. It supported only two output devices, the nroff program produced text oriented tty output, while the troff program generated graphical output for exactly one output device, the Wang Graphic Systems CAT typesetter. In 1979, Brian Kernighan rewrote troff to support more devices by creating an intermediate output format for troff that can be fed into postprocessor programs which actually do the printout on the device. Kernighan's version marks what is known as classical troff today. In order to distinguish it from Ossanna's original mono-device version, it was called ditroff (device independent troff) on some systems, though this naming isn't mentioned in the classical documentation. Today, any existing roff system is based on Kernighan's multi-device troff. The distinction between troff and ditroff isn't necessary any longer, for each modern troff provides already the complete functionality of ditroff. On most systems, the name troff is used to denote ditroff. The easiest way to use ditroff is the GNU roff system, groff. The groff(1) program is a wrapper around (di)troff that automatically handles postprocessing.
This document was written by Bernd Warken ⟨groff-bernd.warken-72@ web.de⟩.
[CSTR #54] The 1992 revision of the Nroff/Troff User's Manual by J. F. Ossanna and Brian Kernighan, see Bell Labs CSTR #54 ⟨http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/cstr/54.ps.gz⟩. [CSTR #97] A Typesetter-independent TROFF by Brian Kernighan is the orig‐ inal documentation of the first multi-device troff (ditroff), see Bell Labs CSTR #97 ⟨http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/cstr/97.ps.gz⟩. roff(7) This document gives details on the history and concepts of roff. troff(1) The actual implementation of ditroff. groff(1) The GNU roff program and pointers to all documentation around groff. groff_out(5) The groff version of the intermediate output language, the basis for multi-devicing.
This page is part of the groff (GNU troff) project. Information
about the project can be found at
⟨http://www.gnu.org/software/groff/⟩. If you have a bug report for
this manual page, see ⟨http://www.gnu.org/software/groff/⟩. This
page was obtained from the project's upstream Git repository
⟨https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/groff.git⟩ on 2018-02-02. (At that
time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in the repos‐
itory was 2018-02-02.) If you discover any rendering problems in
this HTML version of the page, or you believe there is a better or
more up-to-date source for the page, or you have corrections or
improvements to the information in this COLOPHON (which is not part
of the original manual page), send a mail to man-pages@man7.org
Groff Version 1.22.3 24 November 2017 DITROFF(7)
Pages that refer to this page: groff(1), groff_out(5), roff(7)