Hello...
Hope that you are having a nice day and sorry for any inconvenience, just I want to ask what is the meaning of ( troff ) and (groff ) under linux !!!
for example when I user the following command :
man addftinfo
the firt line of the out put said:

*** addftinfo - add information to troff font files for use with groff ***


so what is the troff and what is the groff


Sorry but I'm still new in the linux world and it's really great


Have a nice day.........

Use "man" to get the manual page for a command or program. Just type "man troff" or "man groff" in a terminal.

And don't forget, there's always "google groff" as well.

roff stands for run off, and was a typesetting program which used a particular printer. It is as old as Unix itself. This program was rewritten from scratch so that other typesetting equipment could be used. This is the troff program. Groff is the gnu version of the troff program, and on linux, troff is probably a link to groff. Info pages are preferred over man pages presently. There is also the "tex" system which is used for processing texinfo files and the latex system. This is used more frequently now, and info files are preferred over man pages in GNU/Linux circles.


Here is a little experiment you can try:
man -t groff | kghostview -

Now you can read the groff manpages in style!

Except that almost every program has a man page, while info pages are rather rare. 90% of the time when I use "info program" I get exactly the same page as I get with "man program". So I usually suggest starting there first, and if it has an info page with more detail, you can follow on from there.

BTW, the man page for groff says that it's a wrapper for troff, not a rewrite.

The *roff utilities (nroff, troff and groff) can be useful in documentation (particularly man pages). An excellent book, UNIX Text Processing by Dale Dougherty and Tim O'Reilly (yes, that Tim O'Reilly) is availabe for free at http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/utp/ -- you can download the book as a PDF file and read at your convenience.

UNIX Text Processing gives you an excellent introduction to text processing, covering the editors, regular expressions, and, of course, *roff utilities and the macros that make them easier to use. The nroff utility is for "typewriter" devices; e.g., your screen, quick and dirty. The troff utility is for typesetting; e.g., your printer, really, really nice formatted document.

Worth a look-see.

Thank you all for the helpful information,
the best thing in linux that you should squeeze your brain to get the information which you want, and not like the lazy Windows,

Have a nice day....




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