GROFFER

NAME

groffer - display groff files and man pages on X and tty

SYNOPSIS

groffer [groffer_options] [groff_options] [--] [filespec...]
groffer -h|--help
groffer -v|--version

DESCRIPTION

The groffer program is the easiest way to use groff(1). It can display arbitrary documents written in the groff(7) language or other roff(7) languages that are compatible to the original troff language. The groffer program also includes many of the features for finding and displaying the UNIX manual pages (man pages), such that it can be used as a replacement for a man(1) program. Moreover, compressed files that can be handled by gzip(1) or bzip2(1) are decompressed on-the-fly.

The normal usage is quite simple by supplying a file name or name of a man page without further options. But the option handling has many possibilities for creating special behaviors. These can be stored in a configuration file.

The output can be generated and viewed in several different ways available for groff. This includes the groff native X viewer gxditview(1), each Postcript or dvi display program, a web browser by generating html in www-mode, or several text modes in text terminals.

Most options that must be named when running groff are determined automatically because groffer internally calls the grog(1) program. But all parts can be controlled manually by supplying options.

OPTION OVERVIEW

groffer_options

The following options determine and configure the display mode. They were synchronized with the options of both groff(1) and GNU man(1). If none of these options is used groffer tries to find a suitable display mode automatically.

[-Q|--source] [-T|--device device] [--auto-modes mode1,mode2,...] [--debug] [--default] [--dvi] [--dvi-viewer prog] [--groff] [--location] [--mode display_mode] [--pager program] [--pdf] [--pdf-viewer prog] [--ps] [--ps-viewer prog] [--shell] [--tty] [--www] [--www-viewer prog] [--x] [--x-viewer prog]

The following long options were adapted from the corresponding X Toolkit options. Their single leading minus in X Toolkit was changed to a double minus for long options; see X(1).

[--bd] [--bg|--background] [--bw] [--display] [--fg|--foreground] [--ft|--font] [--geometry size_pos] [--resolution value] [--rv] [--title string] [--xrm X_resource]

The following long options regulate whether and how man pages (UNIX manual pages) are searched. They were constructed for groffer, but they are compatible with the long options of the GNU man program.

[--all] [--ascii] [--apropos] [--ditroff] [--extension suffix] [--locale language] [--local-file] [--man] [--manpath dir1:dir2:...] [--no-location] [--no-man] [--sections sec1:sec2:...] [--systems sys1,sys2,...] [--troff-device device] [--whatis]

The GNU man long options that are not mentioned are recognized, but they are just ignored because of alternative implementations. The full set of long and short options of the GNU man program can be passed via the environment variable $MANOPT; see man(1) if your system has GNU man installed.

groff_options

Any combination of (short) options from the groff(1) program is accepted; the options that are not explicitly handled by groffer are transparently passed to groff. Due to the automatism in groffer, none of these groff options should be necessary, except for advanced usage.

Because of the special outputting behavior of the groff options -V, -X, and -Z, groffer was designed to be switched into groff mode by each of these options; in this mode, the groffer viewing features are disabled.

The other groff options do not switch the mode, but allow to customize the formatting process. Useful groff formatting options include -m (to add macro files that cannot be recognized by grog), and -T (to specify an alternative device for the modes tty and x).

filespec

is one or more file names or templates for searching man pages, see man(1). Each filespec can have one of the following forms.

No filespec parameters means standard input.

man:name.section
man:name(section)
name(section)
name.section

each of these search the man page name in man section section.

std_section name

two arguments like in the man(1) program to find man page name in man section std_section. In groffer, the argument std_section is a standard section name for man pages; these are a digit ‘1’, ..., ‘9’, or the single letters ‘o’ or ‘n’. This should be used only with care.

GROFFER OPTIONS

All short options of groffer are compatible with the short options of groff(1). Some of the groff options were given a special meaning within groffer. All other groff options are supported by groffer, but they are just transparently transferred to groff without any intervention. Therefore these transparent options are not documented here, but in groff(1).

All long options of groffer are compatible with the long options of man(1). Most of the man long options were implemented as native options into groffer. These options are documented in the following; the other man options are recognized, but ignored.

-T devname

Switch to --mode devname. The input is formatted and postprocessed using plain groff with devname as the output device. The allowed device names are listed in groff(1). Note that this forces all device names that begin with the letter X to be displayed with gxditview(1); all other device names generate output for the specified device; this is printed onto standard output without a pager.

--apropos

Instead of displaying, start the ‘apropos’ command for searching within man page descriptions; only kept for compatibility with ‘man’.

--auto-modes mode1,mode2,...

Set the sequence of modes for default mode to the comma separated list given in the argument.

--background color

This is equivalent to --bg.

--bd pixels

Specifies the color of the border surrounding the viewer window. This is an adaption of the X Toolkit option -bd. The argument is an X color name, see (1) for details.

--bg color

Set the background color of the viewer window. This is an adaption of the X Toolkit option -bg. The argument is an X color name, see (1) for details.

--bw pixels

Specifies the width in pixels of the border surrounding the viewer window (not available for all viewers). This is an adaption of the X Toolkit option -bw.

--debug

Print debugging information. Actually, a function call stack is printed if an error occurs.

--default

Reset all configuration from previously processed command line options to the default values. This is useful to wipe out all effects of former options and restart option processing using only the rest of the command line.

--device

Eqivalent to -T.

--display X-display

Set the X display on which the viewer program shall be started, see X(1) for the syntax of the argument.

--ditroff

Eqivalent to -Z. This is kept for compatibiliy with GNU man(1).

--dvi-viewer prog

Set the viewer program for dvi mode. This can be a file name or a program to be searched in $PATH. Known dvi viewers inlude xdvi(1) and dvilx(1) In each case, arguments can be provided additionally.

--extension suffix

Restrict man page search to file names that have suffix appended to their section element. For example, in the file name /usr/share/man/man3/terminfo.3ncurses.gz the man page extension is ncurses. Originates from GNU man.

--foreground color

This is equivalent to --fg.

--fg color

Set the foreground color of the viewer window. This is an adaption of the X Toolkit option --bg. The argument is an X color name, see (1) for details.

--font font_name

This is equivalent to --ft.

--ft font_name

Set the font used by the viewer window. This is an adaption of the X Toolkit option -ft. The argument is an X font name, see (1) for details.

--geometry size_pos

Set the geometry of the display window, that means its size and its starting position. See X(1) for details on the syntax of the argument. If the actual display mode is not X then this option is ignored.

--groff

Set groff mode. Switch groffer to process the input like groff(1). This disables the groffer viewing features, all groffer viewing options are ignored.

--help

Eqivalent to -h.

--location

Print the location of the retrieved files to standard error.

--locale language

Set the language for man pages. This option originates from GNU man(1).

--manpath ’dir1:dir2:...’

Use the specified search path for retrieving man pages instead of the program defaults. If the argument is set to the empty string "" the search for man page is disabled.

--mode value

Set the display mode. The following mode values are recognized:

The following modes do not use the groffer viewing features. They are only interesting for advanced applications.

source

Display source code; same as -Q.

--no-location

Do not display the location of retireved files; this resets a former call to --location.

--no-man

Do not check for man pages.

--pager

Set the pager program in tty mode; default is less.

--pdf-viewer prog

Set the viewer program for pdf mode. This can be a file name or a program to be searched in $PATH. In each case, arguments can be provided additionally.

--ps-viewer prog

Set the viewer program for ps mode. This can be a file name or a program to be searched in $PATH. Common Postscript viewers inlude gv(1), ghostview(1), and gs(1), In each case, arguments can be provided additionally.

--resolution value

Set X resolution in dpi (dots per inch) in some viewer programs. The only supported dpi values are 75 and 100. This is an adaption of the X Toolkit option -resolution.

--sections

Restrict searching for man pages to the given sections, a colon-separated list.

--shell shell_program

Specify the shell under which the groffer script should be run. The script first tests whether this option is set (either within $GROFF_OPT or as a command line option); if so, the script is rerun under the shell program specified with the option argument.

--source

Equivalent to -Q.

--systems

Search for man pages for the given operating systems; the argument systems is a comma-separated list.

--title ’some text’

Set the title for the viewer window. This feature is not available in all viewer programs.

--to-postproc opt_or_arg

Eqivalent to -P.

--troff-device

Eqivalent to -T. This option is only kept for compatibility with GNU man(1).

--version

Eqivalent to -v.

--whatis

Instead of displaying the content, get the one-liner description from the retrieved man page files — or say that it is not a man page.

--where

Eqivalent to --location.

--www-viewer prog

Set the web browser program for viewing in www mode. Each program that accepts html input and allows the file://localhost/dir/file syntax on the command line is suitable; it can be the path name of an executable file or a program in $PATH. In each case, arguments can be provided additionally.

--x-viewer prog

Set the viewer program for x mode. Suitable viewer programs are gxditview(1) and xditview(1). But the argument can be any executable file or a program in $PATH. In each case, arguments can be provided additionally.

Besides these, groffer accepts all arguments that are valid for the groff(1) program. All non-groffer options are sent unmodified via grog to groff. Postprocessors, macro packages, compatibility with classical troff, and much more can be manually specified.

OUTPUT MODES

By default, the groffer program formats the input and then automatically chooses a suitable display mode, but the user can also choose between the following modes:
•

graphically display the formatted input with an X window program, including
•

with X window roff viewers such as gxditview(1) (x mode),

•

in a dvi viewer program (dvi mode),

•

in a Postscript viewer (ps mode),

•

in a PDF viewer (pdf mode),

•

in a web browser (www mode),

•

display formatted input in a pager on the text terminal (tty mode),

•

run groffer like groff, but with decompression and man page searching (groff mode); this includes things like generating the groff intermediate output.

•

stream the unformatted source code of the input onto standard output (source mode),

By default, groffer first tries whether x mode is possible, then ps mode, and finally tty mode. This mode testing sequence for default mode can be changed by specifying a comma separated list of modes with the option --default-modes.

The searching for man pages and the decompression of the input are active in every mode.

Graphical Display Modes

The graphical display modes work only in the X window environment (or similar implementations within other windowing environments). The environment variable $DISPLAY or the option --display are used for specifying the X display to be used; if neither is specified, groffer assumes that no X is running.

A certain graphical display mode can be selected by one of the options --dvi, --pdf, --ps, -X, and --www. By default, some graphical modes are tried first. If none succeeds groffer switches to tty mode.

The graphical modes can be customized by options that were named according to the resource options in the X(1) Toolkit but using a leading double minus instead of the single minus used by X. These include --background, --foreground, --geometry, --resolution, --title, --xrm, etc.

The pdf mode has a major advantage — it is the only graphical diplay mode that allows to search for text within the viewer; this can be a really important feature. Unfortunately, it takes a long time to transform the input into the PDF format, so it was not chosen as the major mode. You can change this by the options --pdf and --auto-modes.

Text mode

If the variable $DISPLAY is not set or empty, groffer assumes that it should produce output on a text terminal. This mode can also be forced by option --tty.

In the actual implementation, the groff output device latin1 is chosen and the processed output is piped into a pager program. This can be changed by specifying option --tty-device.

The pager to be used can be specified by option --pager or by the environment variable $PAGER. If this is not set or empty the less(1) program is used as the default pager.

Non-displaying Modes

There are some special modes that do not display the formatted output in a viewer program. These modes are regarded as advanced, they are useful for debugging purposes.
source mode

Instead of displaying the formatted output, it is also possible to have the roff source code streamed onto the standard output. This mode must be requested by one of the options -Q or --source.

groff mode

This mode disables the groffer viewing facilities. The input is handled as usual with decompression and man page searching, but then it is passed to groff using only the options provided by groff. This enables the user to save the generated output into a file or pipe it into another program. In this mode, the input is formatted, but not postprocessed; see groff_out(5) for details. This mode is activated automatically by the three groff options -V (print roff pipe, no formatting), -X (display with gxditview in groff’s native way, using -P for customization), and -Z (disable post-processing, thus producing the groff intermediate output).

MAN PAGE SEARCHING

The default behavior of groffer is to first test whether a file parameter represents a local file; if it is not an existing file name, it is assumed to represent a name of a man page. This behavior can be modified by the following options.

--no-man
--local-file

disable the man searching; so only local files are displayed.

If neither a local file nor a man page was retrieved for some file parameter a warning is issued on standard error, but processing is continued.

The groffer program provides a search facility for man pages. All long options, all environment variables, and most of the functionality of the GNU man(1) program were implemented. This inludes the extended file names of man pages, for example, the man page of groff in man section 7 may be stored under /usr/share/man/man7/groff.7.gz, where /usr/share/man/ is part of the man path, the subdirectory man7 and the file extension .7 refer to the man section 7; .gz shows the compression of the file.

The cat pages (preformatted man pages) are intentionally excluded from the search because groffer is a roff program that wants to format by its own. With the excellent performance of the actual computers, the preformatted man pages aren’t necessary any longer.

The algorithm for retrieving man pages uses five search methods. They are successively tried until a method works.
•

The search path can be manually specified by using the option --manpath. An empty argument disables the man page searching. This overwrites the other methods.

•

If this is not available the environment variable $MANPATH is searched.

•

If this is empty, the program tries to read it from the environment variable $MANOPT.

•

If this does not work, the manpath(1) program for determining a path of man directories is tried.

•

If this does not work a reasonable default path is searched for man pages.

After this, the path elements for the language (locale) and operating system specific man pages are added to the man path; their sequence is determined automatically. For example, both /usr/share/man/linux/fr and /usr/share/man/fr/linux for french linux man pages are found. The language and operating system names are determined from both environment variables and command line options.

The locale (language) is determined like in GNU man, that is from highest to lowest precedence:
•

--locale

•

$GROFFER_OPT

•

$MANOPT

•

$LCALL

•

$LC_MESSAGES

•

$LANG.

The language locale is usually specified in the POSIX 1003.1 based format:

<language>[_<territory>[.<character-set>[,<version>]]],

but the two-letter code in <language> is sufficient for most purposes.

If no man pages for a complicated locale are found the country part consisting of the first two characters (without the ‘_’, ‘.’, and ‘,’, parts) of the locale is searched as well.

If still not found the corresponding man page in the default language is used instead. As usual, this default can be specified by one of C or POSIX. The man pages in the default language are usually in English.

Several operating systems can be given by appending their names, separated by a comma. This is then specified by the environment variable $SYSTEM or by the command line option --systems. The precedence is similar to the locale case above from highest to lowest precedence: Topic --systems
•

$GROFFER_OPT

•

$MANOPT

•

$SYSTEM.

When searching for man pages this man path with the additional language and system specific directories is used.

The search can further be restricted by limiting it to certain sections. A single section can be specified within each filespec argument, several sections as a colon-separated list in command line option --sections or environment variable $MANSECT. When no section was specified a set of standard sections is searched until a suitable man page was found.

Finally, the search can be restricted to a so-called extension. This is a postfix that acts like a subsection. It can be specified by --extension or environment variable $EXTENSION.

For further details on man page searching, see man(1).

DECOMPRESSION

The program has a decompression facility. If standard input or a file that was retrieved from the command line parameters is compressed with a format that is supported by either gzip(1) or bzip2(1) it is decompressed on-the-fly. This includes the GNU .gz, .bz2, and the traditional .Z compression. The program displays the concatenation of all decompressed input in the sequence that was specified on the command line.

ENVIRONMENT

The groffer programs supports many system variables, most of them by courtesy of other programs. All environment variables of groff(1) and GNU man(1) and some standard system variables are honored.

Native groffer Variables

$GROFFER_OPT

Store options for a run of groffer. The options specified in this variable are overridden by the options given on the command line. The content of this variable is run through the shell builitin ‘eval’; so arguments containing white-space or special shell characters should be quoted.

System Variables

The groffer program is a shell script that is run through /bin/sh, which can be internally linked to programs like bash(1). The corresponding system environment is automatically effective. The following variables have a special meaning for groffer.
$DISPLAY

If this variable is set this indicates that the X window system is running. Testing this variable decides on whether graphical or text output is generated. This variable should not be changed by the user carelessly, but it can be used to start the graphical groffer on a remote X terminal. For example, depending on your system, groffer can be started on the second monitor by the command
sh# DISPLAY=:0.1 groffer what.ever&

$LC_ALL
$LC_MESSAGES

$PAGER

This variable can be used to set the pager for the tty output. For example, to disable the use of a pager completely set this variable to the cat(1) program
sh# PAGER=cat groffer anything

$POSIXLY_CORRECT

If set to a non-empty value this chooses the POSIX mode for option processing, that means that option processing will be finished as soon as a non-option argument is found. Usually, you do not want to set this environment variable.

Groff Variables

The groffer program internally calls groff, so all environment variables documented in groff(1) are internally used within groffer as well. The following variables have a direct meaning for the groffer program.
$GROFF_TMPDIR

If the value of this variable is an existing, writable directory, groffer uses it for storing its temporary files, just as groff does.

Man Variables

Parts of the functionality of the man program were implemented in groffer; support for all environment variables documented in man(1) was added to groffer, but the meaning was slightly modified due to the different approach in groffer; but the user interface is the same. The man environment variables can be overwritten by options provided with $MANOPT, which in turn is overwritten by the command line.
$EXTENSION

Restrict the search for man pages to files having this extension. This is overridden by option --extension; see there for details.

$MANOPT

This variable contains options as a preset for man(1). As not all of these are relevant for groffer only the essential parts of its value are extracted. The options specified in this variable overwrite the values of the other environment variables taht are specific to man. All options specified in this variable are overridden by the options given on the command line.

$MANPATH

If set, this variable contains the directories in which the man page trees are stored. This is overridden by option --manpath.

$MANSECT

If this is a colon separated list of section names, the search for man pages is restricted to those manual sections in that order. This is overridden by option --sections.

$SYSTEM

If this is set to a comma separated list of names these are interpreted as man page trees for different operating systems. This variable can be overwritten by option --systems; see there for details.

The environment variable $MANROFFSEQ is ignored by groffer because the necessary preprocessors are determined automatically.

CONFIGURATION FILES

The groffer program can be preconfigured by two configuration files. Both of them are shell scripts that are called at the beginning of groffer using the ‘. filename’ syntax.
/etc/groff/groffer.conf

System-wide configuration file for groffer.

$HOME/.groff/groffer.conf

User-specific configuration file for groffer, where $HOME denotes the user’s home directory. This script is called after the system-wide configuration file to enable overriding by the user.

It makes sense to use these configuration files for the following tasks:
•

Preset environment variables recognized by groffer; preferably a variable should only be set when it is unset in order not to override a user-provided value.

•

Preset command line options by prepending them to $GROFFER_OPT; prepending should be preferred to appending and setting in order not to delete the environment variable provided by the

•

Write a function for calling a viewer program for a special mode and feed this name into its corresponding --mode-viewer option. Note that the name of such a function must coincide with some existing program in the system path $PATH in order to be recognized by groffer.

As an example, consider the following configuration file.

#! /bin/sh
# ˜/.groff/groffer.conf
if test "$DISPLAY" = ""; then
DISPLAY=’localhost:0.0’;
fi;
GROFF_OPT="--resolution=100 $GROFF_OPT";
gxditview()
{
/usr/local/bin/gxditview --fg DarkBlue "$@";
}
GROFF_OPT="--x-viewer gxditview $GROFF_OPT";

This has the following effects:
•

allows to start groffer in a graphical mode (here on first running X display by localhost:0.0) even from a text terminal (empty $DISPLAY);

•

all graphical modes use a resolution of 100 dpi where applicable;

•

the gxditview(1) program is told to use DarkBlue as the text color by defining a shell function with the program’s name

•

force gxditview to be used in X mode by option --x-viewer.

These configurations can be overridden by command line options and by environment variable $GROFFER_OPT.

EXAMPLES

The usage of groffer is very easy. Usually, it is just called with a file name or man page. The following examples, however, show that groffer has much more fancy capabilities.
sh# groffer /usr/local/share/doc/groff/meintro.ms.gz

Decompress, format and display the compressed file meintro.ms.gz in the directory /usr/local/share/doc/groff, using a default graphical viewer when in X window, or the less(1) pager program when not in X.

sh# groffer groff.7 groff ’troff(1)’ man:roff

The arguments that are not existing files are looked-up as the following man pages: groff (in man section 7), groff (automatic search, should be found in man section 1), troff (in section 1), and roff (in the section with the lowest number, being 7 in this case). The quotes around ’troff(1)’ are necessary because the paranthesis are special shell characters; escaping them with a backslash character \( and \) would be possible, too. The formatted files are concatenated and displayed in one piece.

sh# LANG=de groffer --man --www --www-viever=netscape ls

Retrieve the German man page (language de) for the ls program (the English version is used if there is no German version), decompress it, format it into the html format (www mode) and view the result in the default web browser netscape . The option --man guarantees that the man page is retrieved, even when a local file ls exists in the actual directory.

sh# groffer -Q ’man:roff(7)’

Get the man page called roff in man section 7 and print its unformatted content (source code because of option -Q) on standard output.

sh# cat file.gz | groffer -Z -mfoo

Decompress the standard input, switch to groff using macro package foo (groff option -m) -Z); this produces the groff intermediate output, see groff_out(7).

sh# echo ’\f[CB]WOW!’ |
> groffer --x --bg red --fg yellow --geometry 200x100 -

Display the word WOW! in a small window in constant-width bold font, using color yellow on red background.

COMPATIBILITY

The groffer shell script is compatible to both POSIX and GNU. POSIX compatibility refers to IEEE P1003.2/D11.2 of September 1991, a very early version of this standard. The script uses only a quite restricted set of shell language elements and shell builtins, common to all POSIX versions; the only external program used is ‘sed’, again only the most basic POSIX features of ‘sed’ are used. The groffer script should work on most actual free and commercial operating systems.

The groffer program provides its own parser for command line options; it can handle option arguments and file names containing white space and a large set of special characters.

The groffer shell script was tested with the following common implementations of the POSIX shell: ash(1), bash(1), ksh(1), POSIX sh(1), and others. Free POSIX compatible shells and shell utilities for most operating systems are available at the GNU software archive.

The best performance was obtained with the ash shell; so groffer tries to run under ash whenever possible. If not available the shell under which the script was started in the first place is used instead. This can be modified by the option --shell.

The groffer program provides its own parser for command line arguments that is compatible to both POSIX getopts(1) and GNU getopt(1). The following usual types of options are supported.
•

A single minus always refers to single character options, for example, -Qmfoo is equivalent to -Q -m foo.

•

Long options that means option with names longer than one character are always prededed by a double minus; an option argument can either go to the next command line argument or be appended with an equal sign to the argument; for example, --long=arg is equivalent to --long arg .

•

An argument of -- ends option parsing; all further command line arguments are interpreted as filespec arguments.

•

By default, all command line arguments that are neither options nor option arguments are interpreted as filespec parameters and stored until option parsing has finished. For example, the command line
sh# groffer file1 -a -o arg file2
is, by default, equivalent to
sh# groffer -a -o arg -- file1 file2

This behavior can be changed by setting the environment variable $POSIXLY_CORRECT to a non-empty value; in this case, option processing is stopped as soon as the first non-option argument is found. For example, in posixly correct mode, the command line
sh# groffer file1 -a -o arg file 2
is equivalent to
sh# groffer -- file1 -a -o arg file 2
As this leads to unwanted behavior in most cases, most people do not want to set $POSIXLY_CORRECT.

SEE ALSO

groff(1)
troff(1)

Details on the options and environment variables available in groff; all of them can be used with groffer.

grog(1)

Internally, groffer tries to guess the groff command line options from the input using this program.

groff_out(5)

Documentation on the groff intermediate output (ditroff output).

xdvi(1)
dvilx(1)

Viewers for groffer’s dvi mode.

ghostview(1)

Viewers for groffer’s ps mode.

xpdf(1)

Viewers for pdf files.

gxditview(1)
xditview(1x)

Viewers for groffer’s x mode.

gzip(1)
bzip2(1)

The decompression programs supported by groffer.

man(1)

The standard program to diplay man pages. The information there is only useful if it is the man page for GNU man. Then it documents the options and environment variables that are supported by groffer.

AUTHOR

Copyright (C) 2001, 2002 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 GNU copyleft site.

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