TR1. What is troff? Why are there so many questions about it?

Troff is one of the oldest text formatters in existence. Because
it was distributed as part of the Unix operating system for
many years, it is by default on several hundred thousand machines,
far more than any other Unix text formatter.  It originated
in AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1971 and its author was Joseph
Ossanna.  Its legitimate father was a program called runoff,
written at MIT in the 1960's.

Because there is no comp.text.troff, additional questions related
to troff are shown below.  The remainder of the FAQ list is
devoted to troff; bail out now if you are not interested.

Top Document: comp.text Frequently Asked Questions
Previous Document: GN13. What is RTF?
Next Document: TR2. How many varieties of troff are there? What are the differences?

Single Page

[ Usenet FAQs | Web FAQs | Documents | RFC Index ]

Send corrections/additions to the FAQ Maintainer:
textfaq@ferret.ocunix.on.ca (Text FAQ commentary reception)

Last Update October 23 2009 @ 09:20 AM