groff (1.23.0)
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Versionspdfroff(1) General Commands Manual pdfroff(1)
Name
pdfroff - construct files in Portable Document Format using groff
Synopsis
pdfroff [groff-option] [--emit-ps] [--no-toc-relocation] [--no-kill-null-pages] [--stylesheet=name]
[--no-pdf-output] [--pdf-output=name] [--no-reference-dictionary] [--reference-dictionary=name]
[--report-progress] [--keep-temporary-files] [file ...]
pdfroff -h
pdfroff --help
pdfroff -v [groff-option ...]
pdfroff --version [groff-option ...]
groff-option is any short option supported by groff(1) except for -h, -T, and -v; see section “Usage” below.
Description
pdfroff is a wrapper program for the GNU text processing system, groff. It transparently handles the mechanics
of multiple pass groff processing, when applied to suitably marked up groff source files, such that tables of
contents and body text are formatted separately, and are subsequently combined in the correct order, for final
publication as a single PDF document. A further optional “style sheet” capability is provided; this allows for
the definition of content which is required to precede the table of contents, in the published document.
For each invocation of pdfroff, the ultimate groff output stream is post-processed by the Ghostscript gs(1) in‐
terpreter to produce a finished PDF document.
pdfroff makes no assumptions about, and imposes no restrictions on, the use of any groff macro packages which the
user may choose to employ, in order to achieve a desired document format; however, it does include specific built
in support for the pdfmark macro package, should the user choose to employ it. Specifically, if the pdfhref
macro, defined in the pdfmark.tmac package, is used to define public reference marks, or dynamic links to such
reference marks, then pdfroff performs as many preformatting groff passes as required, up to a maximum limit of
four, in order to compile a document reference dictionary, to resolve references, and to expand the dynamically
defined content of links.
Usage
The command line is parsed in accordance with normal GNU conventions, but with one exception—when specifying any
short form option (i.e., a single character option introduced by a single hyphen), and if that option expects an
argument, then it must be specified independently (i.e., it may not be appended to any group of other single
character short form options).
Long form option names (i.e., those introduced by a double hyphen) may be abbreviated to their minimum length un‐
ambiguous initial substring.
Otherwise, pdfroff usage closely mirrors that of groff itself. Indeed, with the exception of the -h, -v, and
-T dev short form options, and all long form options, which are parsed internally by pdfroff, all options and
file name arguments specified on the command line are passed on to groff, to control the formatting of the PDF
document. Consequently, pdfroff accepts all options and arguments, as specified in groff(1), which may also be
considered as the definitive reference for all standard pdfroff options and argument usage.
Options
pdfroff accepts all of the short form options (i.e., those introduced by a single hyphen), which are available
with groff itself. In most cases, these are simply passed transparently to groff; the following, however, are
handled specially by pdfroff.
-h Same as --help; see below.
-i Process standard input, after all other specified input files. This is passed transparently to groff,
but, if grouped with other options, it must be the first in the group. Hiding it within a group breaks
standard input processing, in the multiple-pass groff processing context of pdfroff.
-T dev Only -T ps is supported by pdfroff. Attempting to specify any other device causes pdfroff to abort.
-v Same as --version; see below.
See groff(1) for a description of all other short form options, which are transparently passed through pdfroff to
groff.
All long form options (i.e., those introduced by a double hyphen) are interpreted locally by pdfroff; they are
not passed on to groff, unless otherwise stated below.
--help Causes pdfroff to display a summary of the its usage syntax, and supported options, and then exit.
--emit-ps
Suppresses the final output conversion step, causing pdfroff to emit PostScript output instead of PDF.
This may be useful to capture intermediate PostScript output when using a specialised postprocessor, such
as gpresent for example, in place of the default Ghostscript PDF writer.
--keep-temporary-files
Suppresses the deletion of temporary files, which normally occurs after pdfroff has completed PDF document
formatting; this may be useful when debugging formatting problems.
See section “Files” below for a description of the temporary files used by pdfroff.
--no-pdf-output
May be used with the --reference-dictionary=name option (described below) to eliminate the overhead of PDF
formatting when running pdfroff to create a reference dictionary for use in a different document.
--no-reference-dictionary
May be used to eliminate the overhead of creating a reference dictionary, when it is known that the target
PDF document contains no public references, created by the pdfhref macro.
--no-toc-relocation
May be used to eliminate the extra groff processing pass, which is required to generate a table of con‐
tents, and relocate it to the start of the PDF document, when processing any document which lacks an auto‐
matically generated table of contents.
--no-kill-null-pages
While preparing for simulation of the manual collation step, which is traditionally required to relocate a
table of contents to the start of a document, pdfroff accumulates a number of empty page descriptions into
the intermediate PostScript output stream. During the final collation step, these empty pages are nor‐
mally discarded from the finished document; this option forces pdfroff to leave them in place.
--pdf-output=name
Specifies the name to be used for the resultant PDF document; if unspecified, the PDF output is written to
standard output. A future version of pdfroff may use this option, to encode the document name in a gener‐
ated reference dictionary.
--reference-dictionary=name
Specifies the name to be used for the generated reference dictionary file; if unspecified, the reference
dictionary is created in a temporary file, which is deleted when pdfroff completes processing of the cur‐
rent document. This option must be specified, if it is desired to save the reference dictionary, for use
in references placed in other PDF documents.
--report-progress
Causes pdfroff to display an informational message on standard error, at the start of each groff process‐
ing pass.
--stylesheet=name
Specifies the name of an input file, to be used as a style sheet for formatting of content, which is to be
placed before the table of contents, in the formatted PDF document.
--version
Causes pdfroff to display a version identification message. The entire command line is then passed trans‐
parently to groff, in a one pass operation only, in order to display the associated groff version informa‐
tion, before exiting.
Environment
The following environment variables may be set, and exported, to modify the behaviour of pdfroff.
PDFROFF_COLLATE
Specifies the program to be used for collation of the finished PDF document.
This collation step may be required to move tables of contents to the start of the finished PDF document,
when formatting with traditional macro packages, which print them at the end. However, users should not
normally need to specify PDFROFF_COLLATE, (and indeed, are not encouraged to do so). If unspecified,
pdfroff uses sed(1) by default, which normally suffices.
If PDFROFF_COLLATE is specified, then it must act as a filter, accepting a list of file name arguments,
and write its output to the standard output stream, whence it is piped to the
PDFROFF_POSTPROCESSOR_COMMAND, to produce the finished PDF output.
When specifying PDFROFF_COLLATE, it is normally necessary to also specify PDFROFF_KILL_NULL_PAGES.
PDFROFF_COLLATE is ignored, if pdfroff is invoked with the --no-kill-null-pages option.
PDFROFF_KILL_NULL_PAGES
Specifies options to be passed to the PDFROFF_COLLATE program.
It should not normally be necessary to specify PDFROFF_KILL_NULL_PAGES. The internal default is a sed(1)
script, which is intended to remove completely blank pages from the collated output stream, and which
should be appropriate in most applications of pdfroff. However, if any alternative to sed(1) is specified
for PDFROFF_COLLATE, then it is likely that a corresponding alternative specification for
PDFROFF_KILL_NULL_PAGES is required.
As in the case of PDFROFF_COLLATE, PDFROFF_KILL_NULL_PAGES is ignored, if pdfroff is invoked with the
--no-kill-null-pages option.
PDFROFF_POSTPROCESSOR_COMMAND
Specifies the command to be used for the final document conversion from PostScript intermediate output to
PDF. It must behave as a filter, writing its output to the standard output stream, and must accept an ar‐
bitrary number of files ... arguments, with the special case of “-” representing the standard input
stream.
If unspecified, PDFROFF_POSTPROCESSOR_COMMAND defaults to
gs -dBATCH -dQUIET -dNOPAUSE -dSAFER -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
-sOutputFile=-
GROFF_TMPDIR
Identifies the directory in which pdfroff should create temporary files. If GROFF_TMPDIR is not speci‐
fied, then the variables TMPDIR, TMP and TEMP are considered in turn as possible temporary file reposito‐
ries. If none of these are set, then temporary files are created in the current directory.
GROFF_GHOSTSCRIPT_INTERPRETER
Specifies the program to be invoked when pdfroff converts groff PostScript output to PDF. If
PDFROFF_POSTPROCESSOR_COMMAND is specified, then the command name it specifies is implicitly assigned to
GROFF_GHOSTSCRIPT_INTERPRETER, overriding any explicit setting specified in the environment. If
GROFF_GHOSTSCRIPT_INTERPRETER is not specified, then pdfroff searches the process PATH, looking for a pro‐
gram with any of the well known names for the Ghostscript interpreter; if no Ghostscript interpreter can
be found, pdfroff aborts.
GROFF_AWK_INTERPRETER
Specifies the program to be invoked when pdfroff is extracting reference dictionary entries from a groff
intermediate message stream. If GROFF_AWK_INTERPRETER is not specified, then pdfroff searches the process
PATH, looking for any of the preferred programs, gawk, mawk, nawk, and awk, in that order; if none of
these are found, pdfroff issues a warning message, and continue processing; however, in this case, no ref‐
erence dictionary is created.
OSTYPE Typically defined automatically by the operating system, OSTYPE is used on Microsoft Win32/MS-DOS plat‐
forms only, to infer the default PATH_SEPARATOR character, which is used when parsing the process PATH to
search for external helper programs.
PATH_SEPARATOR
If set, PATH_SEPARATOR overrides the default separator character, (‘:’ on POSIX/Unix systems, inferred
from OSTYPE on Microsoft Win32/MS-DOS), which is used when parsing the process PATH to search for external
helper programs.
SHOW_PROGRESS
If this is set to a non-empty value, then pdfroff always behaves as if the --report-progress option is
specified on the command line.
Files
Input and output files for pdfroff may be named according to any convention of the user's choice. Typically, in‐
put files may be named according to the choice of the principal normatting macro package, e.g., file.ms might be
an input file for formatting using the ms macros (s.tmac); normally, the final output file should be named
file.pdf.
Temporary files created by pdfroff are placed in the file system hierarchy, in or below the directory specified
by environment variables (see section “Environment” above). If mktemp(1) is available, it is invoked to create a
private subdirectory of the nominated temporary files directory, (with subdirectory name derived from the tem‐
plate pdfroff-XXXXXXXXXX); if this subdirectory is successfully created, the temporary files will be placed
within it, otherwise they will be placed directly in the directory nominated in the environment.
All temporary files themselves are named according to the convention pdf$$.*, where $$ is the standard shell
variable representing the process identifier of the pdfroff process itself, and * represents any of the exten‐
sions used by pdfroff to identify the following temporary and intermediate files.
pdf$$.tmp
A scratch pad file, used to capture reference data emitted by groff, during the reference dictionary com‐
pilation phase.
pdf$$.ref
The reference dictionary, as compiled in the last but one pass of the reference dictionary compilation
phase; (at the start of the first pass, this file is created empty; in successive passes, it contains the
reference dictionary entries, as collected in the preceding pass).
If the --reference-dictionary=name option is specified, this intermediate file becomes permanent, and is
named name, rather than pdf$$.ref.
pdf$$.cmp
Used to collect reference dictionary entries during the active pass of the reference dictionary compila‐
tion phase. At the end of any pass, when the content of pdf$$.cmp compares as identical to pdf$$.ref, (or
the corresponding file named by the --reference-dictionary=name option), then reference dictionary compi‐
lation is terminated, and the document reference map is appended to this intermediate file, for inclusion
in the final formatting passes.
pdf$$.tc
An intermediate PostScript file, in which “Table of Contents” entries are collected, to facilitate reloca‐
tion before the body text, on ultimate output to the Ghostscript postprocessor.
pdf$$.ps
An intermediate PostScript file, in which the body text is collected prior to ultimate output to the
Ghostscript postprocessor, in the proper sequence, after pdf$$.tc.
Authors
pdfroff was written by Keith Marshall ⟨keith.d.marshall@ntlworld.com⟩, who maintains it at his groff-pdfmark OSDN
site ⟨https://osdn.net/users/keith/pf/groff-pdfmark/wiki/FrontPage⟩. groff's version may be withdrawn in a fu‐
ture release.
See also
Groff: The GNU Implementation of troff, by Trent A. Fisher and Werner Lemberg, is the primary groff manual. You
can browse it interactively with “info groff”.
Since pdfroff provides a superset of all groff capabilities, the above manual, or its terser reference page,
groff(7) may also be considered definitive references to all standard capabilities of pdfroff, with this document
providing the reference to pdfroff's extended features.
While pdfroff imposes neither any restriction on, nor any requirement for, the use of any specific groff macro
package, a number of supplied macro packages, and in particular those associated with the package pdfmark.tmac,
are best suited for use with pdfroff as the preferred formatter.
/BuggyBox/groff/1.23.0/any/share/doc/groff-1.23.0/pdf/pdfmark.pdf
“Portable Document Format Publishing with GNU Troff”, by Keith Marshall, offers detailed documentation on
the use of these packages. This file, together with its source, pdfmark.ms, is part of the groff distrib‐
ution.
groff 1.23.0 2 July 2023 pdfroff(1)
Name
pdfroff - construct files in Portable Document Format using groff
Synopsis
pdfroff [groff-option] [--emit-ps] [--no-toc-relocation] [--no-kill-null-pages] [--stylesheet=name]
[--no-pdf-output] [--pdf-output=name] [--no-reference-dictionary] [--reference-dictionary=name]
[--report-progress] [--keep-temporary-files] [file ...]
pdfroff -h
pdfroff --help
pdfroff -v [groff-option ...]
pdfroff --version [groff-option ...]
groff-option is any short option supported by groff(1) except for -h, -T, and -v; see section “Usage” below.
Description
pdfroff is a wrapper program for the GNU text processing system, groff. It transparently handles the mechanics
of multiple pass groff processing, when applied to suitably marked up groff source files, such that tables of
contents and body text are formatted separately, and are subsequently combined in the correct order, for final
publication as a single PDF document. A further optional “style sheet” capability is provided; this allows for
the definition of content which is required to precede the table of contents, in the published document.
For each invocation of pdfroff, the ultimate groff output stream is post-processed by the Ghostscript gs(1) in‐
terpreter to produce a finished PDF document.
pdfroff makes no assumptions about, and imposes no restrictions on, the use of any groff macro packages which the
user may choose to employ, in order to achieve a desired document format; however, it does include specific built
in support for the pdfmark macro package, should the user choose to employ it. Specifically, if the pdfhref
macro, defined in the pdfmark.tmac package, is used to define public reference marks, or dynamic links to such
reference marks, then pdfroff performs as many preformatting groff passes as required, up to a maximum limit of
four, in order to compile a document reference dictionary, to resolve references, and to expand the dynamically
defined content of links.
Usage
The command line is parsed in accordance with normal GNU conventions, but with one exception—when specifying any
short form option (i.e., a single character option introduced by a single hyphen), and if that option expects an
argument, then it must be specified independently (i.e., it may not be appended to any group of other single
character short form options).
Long form option names (i.e., those introduced by a double hyphen) may be abbreviated to their minimum length un‐
ambiguous initial substring.
Otherwise, pdfroff usage closely mirrors that of groff itself. Indeed, with the exception of the -h, -v, and
-T dev short form options, and all long form options, which are parsed internally by pdfroff, all options and
file name arguments specified on the command line are passed on to groff, to control the formatting of the PDF
document. Consequently, pdfroff accepts all options and arguments, as specified in groff(1), which may also be
considered as the definitive reference for all standard pdfroff options and argument usage.
Options
pdfroff accepts all of the short form options (i.e., those introduced by a single hyphen), which are available
with groff itself. In most cases, these are simply passed transparently to groff; the following, however, are
handled specially by pdfroff.
-h Same as --help; see below.
-i Process standard input, after all other specified input files. This is passed transparently to groff,
but, if grouped with other options, it must be the first in the group. Hiding it within a group breaks
standard input processing, in the multiple-pass groff processing context of pdfroff.
-T dev Only -T ps is supported by pdfroff. Attempting to specify any other device causes pdfroff to abort.
-v Same as --version; see below.
See groff(1) for a description of all other short form options, which are transparently passed through pdfroff to
groff.
All long form options (i.e., those introduced by a double hyphen) are interpreted locally by pdfroff; they are
not passed on to groff, unless otherwise stated below.
--help Causes pdfroff to display a summary of the its usage syntax, and supported options, and then exit.
--emit-ps
Suppresses the final output conversion step, causing pdfroff to emit PostScript output instead of PDF.
This may be useful to capture intermediate PostScript output when using a specialised postprocessor, such
as gpresent for example, in place of the default Ghostscript PDF writer.
--keep-temporary-files
Suppresses the deletion of temporary files, which normally occurs after pdfroff has completed PDF document
formatting; this may be useful when debugging formatting problems.
See section “Files” below for a description of the temporary files used by pdfroff.
--no-pdf-output
May be used with the --reference-dictionary=name option (described below) to eliminate the overhead of PDF
formatting when running pdfroff to create a reference dictionary for use in a different document.
--no-reference-dictionary
May be used to eliminate the overhead of creating a reference dictionary, when it is known that the target
PDF document contains no public references, created by the pdfhref macro.
--no-toc-relocation
May be used to eliminate the extra groff processing pass, which is required to generate a table of con‐
tents, and relocate it to the start of the PDF document, when processing any document which lacks an auto‐
matically generated table of contents.
--no-kill-null-pages
While preparing for simulation of the manual collation step, which is traditionally required to relocate a
table of contents to the start of a document, pdfroff accumulates a number of empty page descriptions into
the intermediate PostScript output stream. During the final collation step, these empty pages are nor‐
mally discarded from the finished document; this option forces pdfroff to leave them in place.
--pdf-output=name
Specifies the name to be used for the resultant PDF document; if unspecified, the PDF output is written to
standard output. A future version of pdfroff may use this option, to encode the document name in a gener‐
ated reference dictionary.
--reference-dictionary=name
Specifies the name to be used for the generated reference dictionary file; if unspecified, the reference
dictionary is created in a temporary file, which is deleted when pdfroff completes processing of the cur‐
rent document. This option must be specified, if it is desired to save the reference dictionary, for use
in references placed in other PDF documents.
--report-progress
Causes pdfroff to display an informational message on standard error, at the start of each groff process‐
ing pass.
--stylesheet=name
Specifies the name of an input file, to be used as a style sheet for formatting of content, which is to be
placed before the table of contents, in the formatted PDF document.
--version
Causes pdfroff to display a version identification message. The entire command line is then passed trans‐
parently to groff, in a one pass operation only, in order to display the associated groff version informa‐
tion, before exiting.
Environment
The following environment variables may be set, and exported, to modify the behaviour of pdfroff.
PDFROFF_COLLATE
Specifies the program to be used for collation of the finished PDF document.
This collation step may be required to move tables of contents to the start of the finished PDF document,
when formatting with traditional macro packages, which print them at the end. However, users should not
normally need to specify PDFROFF_COLLATE, (and indeed, are not encouraged to do so). If unspecified,
pdfroff uses sed(1) by default, which normally suffices.
If PDFROFF_COLLATE is specified, then it must act as a filter, accepting a list of file name arguments,
and write its output to the standard output stream, whence it is piped to the
PDFROFF_POSTPROCESSOR_COMMAND, to produce the finished PDF output.
When specifying PDFROFF_COLLATE, it is normally necessary to also specify PDFROFF_KILL_NULL_PAGES.
PDFROFF_COLLATE is ignored, if pdfroff is invoked with the --no-kill-null-pages option.
PDFROFF_KILL_NULL_PAGES
Specifies options to be passed to the PDFROFF_COLLATE program.
It should not normally be necessary to specify PDFROFF_KILL_NULL_PAGES. The internal default is a sed(1)
script, which is intended to remove completely blank pages from the collated output stream, and which
should be appropriate in most applications of pdfroff. However, if any alternative to sed(1) is specified
for PDFROFF_COLLATE, then it is likely that a corresponding alternative specification for
PDFROFF_KILL_NULL_PAGES is required.
As in the case of PDFROFF_COLLATE, PDFROFF_KILL_NULL_PAGES is ignored, if pdfroff is invoked with the
--no-kill-null-pages option.
PDFROFF_POSTPROCESSOR_COMMAND
Specifies the command to be used for the final document conversion from PostScript intermediate output to
PDF. It must behave as a filter, writing its output to the standard output stream, and must accept an ar‐
bitrary number of files ... arguments, with the special case of “-” representing the standard input
stream.
If unspecified, PDFROFF_POSTPROCESSOR_COMMAND defaults to
gs -dBATCH -dQUIET -dNOPAUSE -dSAFER -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
-sOutputFile=-
GROFF_TMPDIR
Identifies the directory in which pdfroff should create temporary files. If GROFF_TMPDIR is not speci‐
fied, then the variables TMPDIR, TMP and TEMP are considered in turn as possible temporary file reposito‐
ries. If none of these are set, then temporary files are created in the current directory.
GROFF_GHOSTSCRIPT_INTERPRETER
Specifies the program to be invoked when pdfroff converts groff PostScript output to PDF. If
PDFROFF_POSTPROCESSOR_COMMAND is specified, then the command name it specifies is implicitly assigned to
GROFF_GHOSTSCRIPT_INTERPRETER, overriding any explicit setting specified in the environment. If
GROFF_GHOSTSCRIPT_INTERPRETER is not specified, then pdfroff searches the process PATH, looking for a pro‐
gram with any of the well known names for the Ghostscript interpreter; if no Ghostscript interpreter can
be found, pdfroff aborts.
GROFF_AWK_INTERPRETER
Specifies the program to be invoked when pdfroff is extracting reference dictionary entries from a groff
intermediate message stream. If GROFF_AWK_INTERPRETER is not specified, then pdfroff searches the process
PATH, looking for any of the preferred programs, gawk, mawk, nawk, and awk, in that order; if none of
these are found, pdfroff issues a warning message, and continue processing; however, in this case, no ref‐
erence dictionary is created.
OSTYPE Typically defined automatically by the operating system, OSTYPE is used on Microsoft Win32/MS-DOS plat‐
forms only, to infer the default PATH_SEPARATOR character, which is used when parsing the process PATH to
search for external helper programs.
PATH_SEPARATOR
If set, PATH_SEPARATOR overrides the default separator character, (‘:’ on POSIX/Unix systems, inferred
from OSTYPE on Microsoft Win32/MS-DOS), which is used when parsing the process PATH to search for external
helper programs.
SHOW_PROGRESS
If this is set to a non-empty value, then pdfroff always behaves as if the --report-progress option is
specified on the command line.
Files
Input and output files for pdfroff may be named according to any convention of the user's choice. Typically, in‐
put files may be named according to the choice of the principal normatting macro package, e.g., file.ms might be
an input file for formatting using the ms macros (s.tmac); normally, the final output file should be named
file.pdf.
Temporary files created by pdfroff are placed in the file system hierarchy, in or below the directory specified
by environment variables (see section “Environment” above). If mktemp(1) is available, it is invoked to create a
private subdirectory of the nominated temporary files directory, (with subdirectory name derived from the tem‐
plate pdfroff-XXXXXXXXXX); if this subdirectory is successfully created, the temporary files will be placed
within it, otherwise they will be placed directly in the directory nominated in the environment.
All temporary files themselves are named according to the convention pdf$$.*, where $$ is the standard shell
variable representing the process identifier of the pdfroff process itself, and * represents any of the exten‐
sions used by pdfroff to identify the following temporary and intermediate files.
pdf$$.tmp
A scratch pad file, used to capture reference data emitted by groff, during the reference dictionary com‐
pilation phase.
pdf$$.ref
The reference dictionary, as compiled in the last but one pass of the reference dictionary compilation
phase; (at the start of the first pass, this file is created empty; in successive passes, it contains the
reference dictionary entries, as collected in the preceding pass).
If the --reference-dictionary=name option is specified, this intermediate file becomes permanent, and is
named name, rather than pdf$$.ref.
pdf$$.cmp
Used to collect reference dictionary entries during the active pass of the reference dictionary compila‐
tion phase. At the end of any pass, when the content of pdf$$.cmp compares as identical to pdf$$.ref, (or
the corresponding file named by the --reference-dictionary=name option), then reference dictionary compi‐
lation is terminated, and the document reference map is appended to this intermediate file, for inclusion
in the final formatting passes.
pdf$$.tc
An intermediate PostScript file, in which “Table of Contents” entries are collected, to facilitate reloca‐
tion before the body text, on ultimate output to the Ghostscript postprocessor.
pdf$$.ps
An intermediate PostScript file, in which the body text is collected prior to ultimate output to the
Ghostscript postprocessor, in the proper sequence, after pdf$$.tc.
Authors
pdfroff was written by Keith Marshall ⟨keith.d.marshall@ntlworld.com⟩, who maintains it at his groff-pdfmark OSDN
site ⟨https://osdn.net/users/keith/pf/groff-pdfmark/wiki/FrontPage⟩. groff's version may be withdrawn in a fu‐
ture release.
See also
Groff: The GNU Implementation of troff, by Trent A. Fisher and Werner Lemberg, is the primary groff manual. You
can browse it interactively with “info groff”.
Since pdfroff provides a superset of all groff capabilities, the above manual, or its terser reference page,
groff(7) may also be considered definitive references to all standard capabilities of pdfroff, with this document
providing the reference to pdfroff's extended features.
While pdfroff imposes neither any restriction on, nor any requirement for, the use of any specific groff macro
package, a number of supplied macro packages, and in particular those associated with the package pdfmark.tmac,
are best suited for use with pdfroff as the preferred formatter.
/BuggyBox/groff/1.23.0/any/share/doc/groff-1.23.0/pdf/pdfmark.pdf
“Portable Document Format Publishing with GNU Troff”, by Keith Marshall, offers detailed documentation on
the use of these packages. This file, together with its source, pdfmark.ms, is part of the groff distrib‐
ution.
groff 1.23.0 2 July 2023 pdfroff(1)