NAME¶
ditroff - classical device independent roff
DESCRIPTION¶
The name
ditroff once marked a development level of the
troff text
processing system. In actual
roff(7) systems, the name
troff is
used as a synonym for
ditroff.
The first roff system was written by Joe Ossanna around 1973. It supported only
two output devices, the
nroff program produced text oriented tty
output, while the
troff program generated graphical output for exactly
one output device, the Wang
Graphic Systems CAT typesetter.
In 1979, Brian Kernighan rewrote troff to support more devices by creating an
intermediate output format for troff that can be fed into postprocessor
programs which actually do the printout on the device. Kernighan's version
marks what is known as
classical troff today. In order to distinguish
it from Ossanna's original mono-device version, it was called
ditroff
(
device
independent
troff) on some systems, though this
naming isn't mentioned in the classical documentation.
Today, any existing roff system is based on Kernighan's multi-device troff. The
distinction between
troff and
ditroff isn't necessary any
longer, for each modern
troff provides already the complete
functionality of
ditroff. On most systems, the name
troff is
used to denote
ditroff.
The easiest way to use ditroff is the GNU roff system,
groff. The
groff(1) program is a wrapper around
(di)troff that
automatically handles postprocessing.
SEE ALSO¶
- [CSTR #54]
- The 1992 revision of the Nroff/Troff User's Manual by J. F.
Ossanna and Brian Kernighan, see
Bell
Labs CSTR #54
- [CSTR #97]
- A Typesetter-independent TROFF by Brian Kernighan is the
original documentation of the first multi-device troff (ditroff),
see
Bell
Labs CSTR #97
- roff(7)
- This document gives details on the history and concepts of roff.
- troff(1)
- The actual implementation of ditroff.
- groff(1)
- The GNU roff program and pointers to all documentation around groff.
- groff_out(5)
- The groff version of the intermediate output language, the basis for
multi-devicing.
AUTHORS¶
Copyright (C) 2001, 2002, 2004, 2007-2009, 2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This document is distributed under the terms of the FDL (GNU Free Documentation
License) version 1.3 or later. You should have received a copy of the FDL on
your system, it is also available on-line at the
GNU
copyleft site
This document is part of
groff, the GNU roff distribution. It was written
by
Bernd
Warken and is maintained by
Werner Lemberg