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  • Groff

    From Prisonpotato@prisonpotato@tilde.team to tilde.projects on Fri May 14 17:31:05 2021
    Does anyone know any good resources for learning groff?
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  • From Dacav Doe@dacav@tilde.institute to tilde.projects on Sun May 16 17:53:16 2021
    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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  • From xwindows@xwindows@tilde.club to tilde.projects on Mon May 17 04:03:26 2021
    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
    --
    P.S.
    This post is written with a Ventilated Prose technique
    (known as Semantic Linefeed in modern nomenclature)
    applied using RFC 2646 "text/plain; format=flowed" format,
    posted via a Sendmail-esque `inews`.
    Please let me know if your newsreader displayed this
    in a poetically-weird way.
    .
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  • From James Tomasino@tomasino@cosmic.voyage to tilde.projects on Mon May 17 11:09:36 2021
    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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  • From darkthorne@darkthorne@mail.com to tilde.projects on Mon May 31 22:06:58 2021
    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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  • From met@met@ph.or to tilde.projects on Sat Jun 12 01:48:49 2021
    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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  • From f6k@f6k@huld.re to tilde.projects on Sun Jun 13 11:52:58 2021
    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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  • From Alexander@amr@tilde.club to tilde.projects on Mon Mar 28 22:18:27 2022
    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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  • From Tengri Temujin@tengri@temuj.in to tilde.projects on Mon Jul 18 18:00:36 2022
    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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  • From Anton Shepelev@ant@tilde.club to tilde.projects on Thu Sep 12 01:18:17 2024
    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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