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Name | Description | Authors | See Also | COLOPHON |
ditroff(7) Miscellaneous Information Manual ditroff(7)
ditroff - classical device-independent roff
The name ditroff refers to a historical development stage of the
roff(7) text processing system. In roff systems extant today, the
name troff is a synonym for ditroff.
Early versions of roff by Joe Ossanna generated two programs from the
same sources, using conditional compilation to distinguish them.
nroff produced text-oriented TTY output, while troff generated
graphical output for exactly one output device, the Wang Graphic
Systems CAT phototypesetter.
In 1979, Brian Kernighan rewrote troff to support more devices by
creating an intermediate output format for troff that could 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 version,
it was called ditroff (device independent troff) on some systems,
though this naming isn't mentioned in the classical documentation.
Today, all existing roff systems are based on Kernighan's multi-
device troff. The distinction between troff and ditroff is no longer
necessary; each modern troff provides the complete functionality of
ditroff.
The easiest way to use ditroff is via the GNU roff system, groff.
The groff(1) program is a wrapper around (di)troff that automatically
handles device postprocessing.
This document was written by Bernd Warken ⟨groff-bernd.warken-72@
web.de⟩.
CSTR #54
refers to the 1992 revision of the Nroff/Troff User's Manual
by J. F. Ossanna and Brian Kernighan.
CSTR #97
refers to A Typesetter-independent TROFF, by Brian Kernighan
and is the original documentation of the first multi-device
troff (ditroff).
roff(7)
provides a history and conceptual overview of roff systems.
troff(1)
describes the GNU implementation of (di)troff.
groff(1)
documents the GNU roff program and includes pointers to
further documentation about groff.
groff_out(5)
describes the groff version of the intermediate output
language, the basis for multi-device output.
This page is part of the groff (GNU troff) project. Information
about the project can be found at
⟨http://www.gnu.org/software/groff/⟩. If you have a bug report for
this manual page, see ⟨http://www.gnu.org/software/groff/⟩. This
page was obtained from the project's upstream Git repository
⟨https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/groff.git⟩ on 2020-08-13. (At that
time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in the repos‐
itory was 2020-08-12.) If you discover any rendering problems in
this HTML version of the page, or you believe there is a better or
more up-to-date source for the page, or you have corrections or
improvements to the information in this COLOPHON (which is not part
of the original manual page), send a mail to man-pages@man7.org
groff 1.22.4.234-3ba6 16 May 2020 ditroff(7)
Pages that refer to this page: groff(1) , groff_out(5) , roff(7)