Manual Pages for UNIX Operating System command usage for man ditroff

Device and Network Interfaces                          DITROFF(7)



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 Osanna around 1973.
     It supported only two output devices, the nroff program pro-
     duced text oriented tty output, while the troff program gen-
     erated  graphical  output for exactly one output device, the
     Wang Graphic Systems CAT typesetter.

     In 1979, Brian Kernighan rewrote troff to support more  dev-
     ices  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 distin-
     guish  it from Osanna's original mono-device version, it was
     called ditroff (d/evice~i/ndependent~troff/)  on  some  sys-
     tems,  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 ditr-
     off isn't necessary any longer, for each modern  troff  pro-
     vides  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.

ATTRIBUTES
     See attributes(5) for descriptions of the  following  attri-
     butes:

     ____________________________________________________________
    |       ATTRIBUTE TYPE        |       ATTRIBUTE VALUE       |
    |_____________________________|_____________________________|
    | Availability                | SUNWgroff                   |
    |_____________________________|_____________________________|
    | Interface stability         | Uncommitted                 |
    |_____________________________|_____________________________|


SEE ALSO
     [CSTR~#54]
          The 1992 revision of the Nroff/Troff User's  Manual  by
          J. F. Osanna and Brian Kernighan, see




Groff Version 1.19.2Last change: 21 October 2010                 1






Device and Network Interfaces                          DITROFF(7)



     [CSTR~#97]
          A Typesetter-independent TROFF by  Brian  Kernighan  is
          the  original  documentation  of the first multi-device
          troff (ditroff/), see

     roff(7)
          This document gives details on the history and concepts
          of roff.

     gtroff(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  Free  Software  Foundation,
     Inc.

     This document is distributed under the terms of the FDL (GNU
     Free  Documentation  License)  version  1.1  or  later.  You
     should have received a copy of the FDL on your system, it is
     also available on-line at the

     This document is part of groff, the GNU  roff  distribution.
     It was written by and is maintained by
























Groff Version 1.19.2Last change: 21 October 2010                 2