nroff

Name

nroff - format documents with groff for TTY (terminal) devices

Synopsis

nroff [-cCEhipStUV] [-dcs] [-mname] [-Mdir] [-nnum] [-olist] [-Ppost-proc-option] [-rcn] [-Tname] [-wwarning] [-Wwarning] [file ...]
nroff --help
nroff -v nroff --version

Description

nroff formats documents written in the roff(7) language for typewriter-like devices such as terminal emulators. GNU nroff emulates the AT&T nroff command using groff(1). nroff generates output via grotty(1), groff’s terminal output driver, which needs to know the character encoding scheme used by the device. Consequently, acceptable arguments to the -T option are ascii, latin1, utf8, and cp1047; any others are ignored. If neither the GROFF_TYPESETTER environment variable nor the -T command-line option (which overrides the environment variable) specifies a (valid) device, nroff consults the locale to select an appropriate output device. It first tries the locale(1) program, then checks several locale-related environment variables; see section “Environment”, below. If all of the foregoing fail, -Tascii is implied.

Whitespace is not permitted between an option and its argument. The -C, -d, -E, -i, -m, -M, -n, -o, -P, -r, -w, and -W options have the effect described in troff(1). -c and -h are equivalent to “-P-c” and “-P-h”, respectively. In addition, this implementation ignores the AT&T nroff options -e, -q, and -s (which are not implemented in groff). The options -p (pic), -t (tbl), -S (safer), and -U (unsafe) are passed to groff. -V causes nroff to display the constructed groff command on the standard output, but does not execute it. -v and --version show version information, while --help displays a usage message; all exit afterward.

Environment

GROFF_BIN_PATH

is a colon-separated list of directories in which to search for the groff executable before searching in PATH. If unset, /usr/local/bin is used.

GROFF_TYPESETTER

specifies the default output device for groff.

LC_ALL
LC_CTYPE

LESSCHARSET

are pattern-matched in this order for contents matching standard character encodings supported by groff in the event no -T option is given and GROFF_TYPESETTER is unset.

Notes

Pager programs like more(1) and less(1) may require command-line options to correctly handle some output sequences; see grotty(1).

Character definitions in the file /usr/local/share/groff/1.23.0/tmac/ tty-char.tmac are loaded to replace unrepresentable glyphs.

See also

groff(1), troff(1), grotty(1), locale(1), roff(7)