Does anyone know any good resources for learning groff?
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On 2021-05-15, Prisonpotato <prisonpotato@tilde.team> wrote:

Does anyone know any good resources for learning groff?

I know something.

I've tried to look at the classic groff, but I found it horribly difficult.

Over time I've tried a number of formats that can be compiled into groff manpages. The best I found is Perl's "POD" format. Useful even if your software is not written in Perl.

Then a colleague of mine pointed me at mdoc(7), which is a collection of "semantic" groff macros. That's very usable, I would really recommend it. I wrote in fact all the manpages of Crossbow[1] with it.

The manpage is very clear (as by openbsd tradition), even if you don't know groff. Moreover, there's a linter (`mandoc -T lint [file ...]`).


[1] Crossbow - https://gitlab.com/dacav/crossbow
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On Fri, 14 May 2021, Prisonpotato wrote:

Does anyone know any good resources for learning groff?

So far,
I have only been using Troff
(nearly exclusively GNU Troff)
in a Unix manual page usage,
via the classic `man` macro set.

I used to skim web tutorials for it;
but lately,
after living part-offline life for a while,
I have found myself
using GNU Troff's TeXInfo manual for this more and more.
Note that this is not exactly
an absolute-beginner material,
but it is concise
and have served me well as a quick reference.

If you are using GNU/Linux-based setup,
this reference book is likely already available offline
from a local TeXInfo installation near you:

$ info groff
$ info -f groff -n man

And also
in the WWW format:

<https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/> <https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/html_node/man.html>

Cheers to the Unix book formats of yore,
~xwindows
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On 2021-05-17, xwindows <xwindows@tilde.club> wrote:

On Fri, 14 May 2021, Prisonpotato wrote:

Does anyone know any good resources for learning groff?

So far,
I have only been using Troff

I'm also mostly a troff user. I found the following book quite helpful
in learning the ins and outs. It's pretty basic stuff until you get into macros.

https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0139309594/trofforg-20
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On Fri, 14 May 2021 17:31:05 -0700
Prisonpotato <prisonpotato@tilde.team> wrote:

Does anyone know any good resources for learning groff?

Troff quick tutorial:
1. https://www.troff.org/TheGroffFriendsHowto.pdf
2. https://github.com/SubhadityaMukherjee/groffTutorial

MS format, very good handy info:
1. https://l04db4l4nc3r.github.io/groff-cheatsheet/
2. https://troff.org/using-ms.pdf

Also search for Luke Smith GROFF tutorial on youtube :)
--
LM
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Prisonpotato <prisonpotato@tilde.team> wrote:

Does anyone know any good resources for learning groff?

There is a UNIX Text Processing free ebook: https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/utp/

Also the documentation and links from the MOM Groff macro author: http://www.schaffter.ca/mom/mom-01.html
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hi

On 2021-05-15, Prisonpotato <prisonpotato@tilde.team> wrote:

Does anyone know any good resources for learning groff?

some years ago i've used this to learn:

https://www.rfc-editor.org/materials/nroff.html http://www.gno.org/gno/man/man1/nroff.1.html

and what is available at ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc-editor/

especially 2-nroff.template and 3-nroff.template helped me a lot.

-f6k
--
~{,_,"> gopher://shl.huld.re/1/~f6k
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On 14/05/2021 20:31, Prisonpotato wrote:

Does anyone know any good resources for learning groff?

I know this is an old thread, but my advice is learn TeX instead of
*roff. LaTeX is much more flexible, easy to learn, and with the many TeX backends plus pandoc you can do just as much as *roff if not more.

Unless you are learning *roff for a particular reason (ie, using a
vintage system), in which case... I would look around online for stuff
that was typeset using eqn/nroff etc. Bell Labs typeset a lot of stuff
this way, the sources might be floating around somewhere.
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On 5/14/21 19:31, Prisonpotato wrote:

Does anyone know any good resources for learning groff?

I can't help much with your old question but I am impelled to respond
and bump this thread.

'Prisonpotato' is a most excellent appellation. If I had a horde you
would be a fine choice for General. Imagine the look of horror of the Sultanate or the Shah when hearing, 'Sire, Prison Potato and his horde
of Mongols ride this way!'

The packages, ronn and ruby-ronn can convert markdown to roff manpage
format. Pandoc may also have some flags for conversion between groff,
troff, nroff, etc. Roffit should convert manpage format to HTML, which
can then be processed by Pandoc to many other formats.

If you can find a good transpiler you can analyze conversions of short
texts to feel out the syntax.

--

Tengri Temujin

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Prisonpotato <prisonpotato@tilde.team> wrote:

Does anyone know any good resources for learning groff?

I learned Groff by reading the manual and consulting on the maling list,
which is available through NNTP via Gmane. At work, I typeset an entire framework manual in Groff, and as a hobby I used it to typeset the
/CoreOps/ newsletter about CoreWar:

<https://corewar.co.uk/coreops.htm>

Also, I have created macros to faclitate writing e-mails and FidoNet
posts, but I have not transfered them here to tilde.club (yet).

As one who wrote one's thesis in LaTeX, I am of opinion that *roff is
much simpler than *Tex, and easier to learn from the ground up.
It is also more satisfactory, when you really understand how things work
and feel able to reproduce any behavior of any package, and to write
your won. I have never been able to feel that way about LaTeX.

All this was coon's lifetime ago, however, so I am not good at Groff,
anymore, but ask away. If what you want to do with Groff is
interesting, I will try to help.
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