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troff (), short for "typesetter roff", is the major component of a document processing system developed by Bell Labs for the Unix operating system. troff and the related nroff were both developed from the original roff.
While nroff was intended to produce output on terminals and line printers, troff was intended to produce output on typesetting systems, specifically the Graphic Systems CAT, which had been introduced in 1972. Both used the same underlying markup language, and a single source file could normally be used by nroff or troff without change.
troff features commands to designate fonts, spacing, paragraphs, margins, footnotes and more. Unlike many other text formatters, troff can position characters arbitrarily on a page, even overlapping them, and has a fully programmable input language. Separate preprocessors are used for more convenient production of tables, diagrams, and mathematics. Inputs to troff are plain text files and can be created by any text editor.
Extensive macro packages have been created for various document styles. A typical distribution of troff includes the me macros for formatting research papers, man and mdoc macros for creating Unix man pages, mv macros for creating mountable transparencies, and the ms and mm macros for letters, books, technical memoranda, and reports.
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- 2025-08-22T00:00:00.000000Z
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