Troff Text Processor for Typesetters

"The great strength of troff is the flexibility of the basic language and its programmability -- it can be made to do almost any formatting task."
-- Brian W. Kernighan, Rob Pike - The UNIX Programming Environment

Troff is a document processing system, and it's part of the default UNIX text processing tools.

• troff - for output device that can handle variable-width fonts and different character sizes
• nroff - produces output suitable for simple fixed-width terminals or line printers
• groff - a GNU licensed implementation of the ditroff and all the troff preprocessors
• unroff - a free flexible implementation of troff written in Scheme
  

Even though now it has been superseded by T_EX and L^AT_EX, troff is still quite common, as UNIX manual pages for the "man" command are written in troff, using the "man macros".

"Since bare troff is unusable by humans, a race of gods now gone created macro packages for mortals to use."
-- Brian Kernighan on the troff macro package.

On some systems manpages are stored in compressed formats, so, before we operate on such a manpage, we need to uncompress it.

Let's use groff and the man macros to convert a manpage to ps, and send it to the printer spooler.

% cat /usr/share/man/man7/bootparam.7.gz | gunzip | groff -man | lpr

We could also send it to ps2pdf to publish the manpage as pdf.

% cat /usr/share/man/man1/groff.1.gz | gunzip | groff -man > groff.ps && ps2pdf groff.ps && xpdf groff.pdf"

If you plan on doing anything serious with troff, you should take a look at Bell Labs Computing Science Technical Report #54, Troff User's Manual.