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So, I have a text file, embedded with troff formatting commands. However, my printer is currently broken, but I want to see what the file looks like, so I can make sure everything is correct. Is there a program that can interpret the commands and show me a file preview? It has to exist. I probably sound really dumb right now, but I cant find info on this matter. somewhere on the Internet it said to use proof or page, but neither of those commands exist on my system.

user3002620
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  • Did you really send your file to your printer, just to proof it? See https://forums.freebsd.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=44703 for how to send it to a PostScript file, which can be viewed directly (OX Preview; Ghostscript) or further processed into a PDF. – Jongware Apr 14 '14 at 20:50
  • I didn't send anything to my printer because it isn't working i'm looking for a way to preview the file in a window. you mentioned Ghost script bu that isn't on my system either – user3002620 Apr 15 '14 at 02:17

1 Answers1

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troff allows you to output to an ASCII text file with:

troff -a x.roff

If you have groff installed, then you can convert it to:

  • ASCII text groff -Tascii x.roff > x.txt
  • HTML groff -Thtml x.roff > x.html
  • or DVI groff -Tdvi x.roff > x.dvi

If you have ps2pdf, you can try to convert your postscript file to a PDF (ps2pdf x.ps).

There are also online services to convert a ps file to a PDF; such as http://www.ps2pdf.com.

Alexander
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user3512334
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