groff (software)
groff (/ˈdʒiːrɒf/ JEE-roff) (also called GNU troff) is a typesetting system that creates formatted output when given plain text mixed with formatting commands. It is the GNU replacement for the troff and nroff text formatters, which were both developed from the original roff.
| Original author(s) | James Clark |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | GNU Project |
| Initial release | June 1990 |
| Stable release | |
| Repository | |
| Written in | C++ |
| Type | Typesetting |
| License | 2009: GPL-3.0-or-later 1992: GPL-2.0-or-later 1990: GPL-1.0-or-later |
| Website | gnu |
Groff contains a large number of helper programs, preprocessors, and postprocessors including eqn, tbl, pic and soelim. There are also several macro packages included that duplicate, expand on the capabilities of, or outright replace the standard troff macro packages.
Groff development of new features is active, and is an important part of free, open source, and UNIX derived operating systems such as Linux and 4.4BSD derivatives — notably because troff macros are used to create man pages, the standard form of documentation on Unix and Unix-like systems.
OpenBSD has replaced groff with mandoc in the base install, since their 4.9 release, as has macOS Ventura.