groff-base

This package contains the traditional UN*X text formatting tools troff, nroff, tbl, eqn, and pic. These utilities, together with the man-db package, are essential for displaying the on-line manual pages. groff-base is a stripped-down package containing the necessary components to read manual pages in ASCII, Latin-1, and UTF-8, plus the PostScript device (groff's default). Users who want a full groff installation, with the standard set of devices, fonts, macros, and documentation, should install the groff package.

groff

This package contains optional components of the GNU troff text-formatting system. The core package, groff-base, contains the traditional tools like troff, nroff, tbl, eqn, and pic. This package contains additional devices and drivers for output to DVI, HTML (when recommended packages are installed - see below), PDF, HP LaserJet printers, and Canon CAPSL LBP-4 and LBP-8 printers. The X75, X75-12, X100, and X100-12 devices, which allow groff output to be conveniently viewed on an X display using the standard X11 fonts, are now included here. They were previously in a separate package, groff-x11. Besides these, the groff package contains man pages describing the language and its macro sets, info documentation, and a number of supplementary programs: - gxditview, which is used to display the output of the X* devices, and can also be used to view PostScript output from groff; - grn, a preprocessor for pictures in the 'gremlin' format; - tfmtodit, which creates font files for use with 'groff -Tdvi'; - hpftodit, which creates font files for use with 'groff -Tlj4'; - afmtodit, which creates font files for use with 'groff -Tps'; - refer, which preprocesses bibliographic references for use with groff; - indxbib, which creates inverted indices for bibliographic databases used by 'refer'; - lkbib and lookbib, which search bibliographic databases; - addftinfo, which adds metric information to troff font files for use with groff; - pfbtops, which translates a PostScript font in .pfb format to ASCII for use with groff; - mmroff, a simple groff preprocessor which expands references in mm; - pic2graph, which converts PIC diagrams into cropped image files; - eqn2graph, which converts EQN equations into cropped image files; - pdfmom, which runs 'groff -mom' to produce PDFs. All the standard macro packages are supported. Some facilities only work if certain recommended packages are installed: - ghostscript, netpbm, psutils: required for HTML output; - imagemagick: required for the pic2graph and eqn2graph programs; - libpaper1: paper size detection in dvi, lbp, lj4, and ps devices (falls back to a4 if not installed); - perl: required for PDF output and for the chem preprocessor.

man-db

This package provides the man command, the primary way of examining the on-line help files (manual pages). Other utilities provided include the whatis and apropos commands for searching the manual page database, the manpath utility for determining the manual page search path, and the maintenance utilities mandb, catman and zsoelim. man-db uses the groff suite of programs to format and display the manual pages.