A document preparation package that comes with most UNIX systems is
nroff-troff. The command troff is used to process
a document for viewing on a graphics terminal or a laser printer, while
the nroff command is used to produce output on a lineprinter or a
character-mapped screen. Input documents for these commands consist of
text with formatting commands that indicate the typestyle and organization
of the output document. A UNIX reference book or the online manual
pages are places where you can learn the syntax of nroff-troff
documents.
There is a considerable amount of documentation written using nroff.
Even if you choose to use a more powerful text preparation system, you need to
be familiar with nroff conversions so that the documentation provided
with a program can be viewed in a readable form.
A nroff formatted document is recognizable by the formatting statements
that start with a period, such as '.PP' and '.TH'.
To get an ascii approximation of a nroff formatted file, use the
nroff command with output redirected to another file:
nroff <filename> > <outfilename>
This output file is a printable ascii file. View the document
with the more command before sending it to a printer to make
sure the document looks the way you want it to
If the document was formatted for use as an online manual page,
use the -man argument for the best results:
nroff -man <filename> > <outfilename>
*or*
nroff -man <filename> | more
Do not attempt to use troff to print documents on the laser
printers here. Although the troff command's sole purpose is to produce
documents printable on a laser printer, it is not supported on any of
the Computer Science Department's printers. Attempts to use troff even
on small 'test' documents can generate hundreds of pages of output,
with only a few meaningless characters on each page, so please don't try.