Home – Papers on troff and its companions

Papers on troff and its companions

Much of the material available was written at Bell Labs. The CSTR documents below refer to ‘Computer Science Technical Reports’, a Bell Labs internal numbering system used in the past.

If you know of a more ‘official’ URL for any of these papers or know of others that should be added please let me know.

troff

A TROFF Tutorial.
Brian W. Kernighan, Unix Version 7 manual, 1978.
Nroff/Troff User's Manual.
CSTR #54, J. F. Ossanna, Bell Labs, 1976. Revised by Brian Kernighan, 1992. Local PDF version.
A Typesetter-Independent TROFF.
CSTR #97, B. W. Kernighan, Bell Labs, 1981, revised March 1982.
Troff User's Manual, Plan 9 Ed..
B. W. Kernighan. Poorly formatted, e.g. the word ‘slant’ on page 2.

Macro packages

MM - Memorandum Macros.
D. W. Smith, J. R. Mashey, E. C. Pariser, and N. W. Smith, AT&T Bell Laboratories, June 1980.
Addendum to the Memorandum Macros User's Manual.
December, 1986.
Writing Papers with NROFF using -me.
Eric P. Allman, University of California Berkeley, 1986.
-me Reference Manual.
Eric P. Allman, University of California Berkeley, 1986.

tbl

Tbl — A Program to Format Tables.
M. E. Lesk, 1977.
Tbl — A Program to Format Tables.
L. L. Cherry, M. E. Lesk, 1976.

pic

Additionally preprocessors that generate pic input.

PIC — A Graphics Language for Typesetting (Revised User Manual).
CSTR #116, Brian W. Kernighan, Bell Labs, December 1984.
GRAP — A Language for Typesetting Graphs (Tutorial and User Manual).
CSTR #114, Jon L. Bentley and Brian W. Kernighan, Bell Labs, August 1984.
CHEM — A Program for Typesetting Chemical Structure Diagrams.
CSTR #122, J. L. Bentley, L. W. Jelinski, and B. W. Kernighan, Computers and Chemistry, Bell Labs, April 1986.
A System for Algorithm Animation (Tutorial and User Manual).
CSTR #132, J. L. Bentley and B. W. Kernighan, Bell Labs, January 1987. Instrument your programs with graphics.
DFORMAT — A Program for Typesetting Data Formats.
CSTR #142, Jon L. Bentley, Bell Labs, April 1988.

eqn

Typesetting Mathematics, User's Guide (Second Edition).
Brian Kernighan and Lorinda Cherry, 1978.
Typesetting Mathematics, User's Guide.
Brian Kernighan and Lorinda Cherry, 1976.
A System for Typesetting Mathematics.
Brian W. Kernighan and Lorinda L. Cherry, CACM, 1975.
A Guide to Typesetting Mathematics using GNU eqn.
Ted Harding, 2011.

refer

Some Applications of Inverted Indexes on the UNIX System.
M. E. Lesk.

Indexing

Maintaining Cross References in Manuscripts.
CSTR #127, A. V. Aho and R. Sethi, Bell Labs, September 1986.
Tools for Printing Indexes.
CSTR #128, J. L. Bentley and B. W. Kernighan, Bell Labs, October 1986.

To Do

gpic.raymond.ps
msmacros.ps
IDEAL User's Manual.
CSTR #103, C. J. Van Wyk, Bell Labs, December 1981. Some interesting ideas about using constraints to describe picture-drawing.
A User's Manual for MetaPost.
CSTR #162, John D. Hobby, Bell Labs, April 1992.
Drawing Graphs with MetaPost.
CSTR #164, John D. Hobby, Bell Labs.

http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/10thEdMan/v2contents.html — interesting stuff, including -mpm.

http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/4599.html http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/wolfman89flo.html

%A David Barron
%A Mike Rees
%T Text processing and typesetting with Unix
%I International Computer Science Series/Addison-Wesley
%G 0-201-14219-8
%P 447
%D 1987

%A Kaare Christian
%T The Unix text Processing System
%I Wiley-Interscience
%G 0-471-85581-2
%P 250

%A Trevor Darrell
%A Ned Batchelder
%T Psfig - A Ditroff Preprocessor for PostScript Figures
%J USENIX Conferences Proceedings
%P 12
%C Phoenix
%D 1987

%A Dale Dougherty
%A Tim O'Reilly
%T Unix Text Processing
%I Hayden Books
%G ISBN 0-672-46291-5
%P 666

%A Narain Gehani
%T Document Formatting and Typesetting on the UNIX System
%V I
%P 364
%I SILICON PRESS
%D 1986

%A Narain Gehani
%A Steven Lally
%T Document Formatting and Typesetting on the UNIX System
%V II
%P 304
%I SILICON PRESS
%D 1988

%A Brian W. Kernighan
%T A TROFF Tutorial
%P 13
%I AT&T Bell Laboratories
%C Murray Hill
%D 1978

%A Brian W. Kernighan
%T PIC - A Crude Graphics Language For Typesetting
%J Computing Science Technical Report
%V No 85
%I Bell Laboratories
%D 1981

%A Brian W. Kernighan
%T pic - A Language for Typesetting Graphics
%J Software Practice and Experience
%V 12
%P 21
%D 1982

%A Brian W. Kernighan
%T PIC - A Graphics Language For Typesetting (Revised User Manual)
%J Computing Science Technical Report
%V No 116
%I AT&T Bell Laboratories
%C Murray Hill, New Jersey 07974, USA
%D 1984

%A Brian W. Kernighan
%T A typesetter-Independent troff
%P 15
%I AT&T Bell Laboratories
%C Murray Hill
%D 1982

%A Brian W. Kernighan
%A Lorinda L. Cherry
%T Typesetting Mathematics - User's Guide
%P 11
%I AT&T Bell Laboratories
%C Murray Hill
%D 1986

%A Brian W. Kernighan
%A Jon L. Bentley
%T Grap - A language for Typesetting Graphs
%J Communications of the ACM
%P 11
%V 29-8
%D 1986

%A Mike E. Lesk
%T TBL - A Program To Format Tables
%P 18
%I AT&T Bell Laboratories
%C Murray Hill
%D 1976

%A Mike E. Lesk
%T Some Applications of Inverted Indexes on the Unix System
%V 2a
%P 13
%I Bell Laboratories
%D 1978

%A Mike E. Lesk
%T Typing Documents on the UNIX System: Using the -ms Macros with Troff and Nroff
%P 8
%I AT&T Bell Laboratories
%C Murray Hill
%D 1983

%A Kevin P. Roddy
%T UNIX Nroff/Troff: A User's Guide
%I Holt, Rinehart, Winston
%D 1987

%A Bill Tuthill
%T A Revised Version of -ms
%P 3
%I University of California Berkeley
%D 1986

%A Bill Tuthill
%T Refer - A Bibliography System
%P 10
%I University of California Berkeley
%D 1986

%A C. J. Van Wyk
%T A Graphics Typesetting Language
%J Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN SIGOA Symposium on Text Manipulation
%P 9
%C Portland Oregon

%A C. J. Van Wyk
%T ideal Users's Manual
%J Computing Science Technical Report
%V 103
%I AT&T Bell Laboratories
%D 1981

%A Sandra Emerson
%A Karen Paulsell
%T troff typesetting for UNIX Systems
%P Prentice-Hall
%G ISBN 0-13-930959-4
%P 360

%A Henry McNabb
%A Mary McGilton
%T Typesetting Tables on the UNIX System
%P Trilithon Press
%G ISBN 0-9626289-0-5
%D 1990
%P 282

From:    Bernd Salbrechter <salb@pce783.gud.siemens.at>
Subject: Re: [Groff] graphviz - something you may also add in troff.org 
Date:    Tue, 30 Apr 2002 13:43:10 +0200

BTW. Have you any information about a preprocessor
  ‘G3 - A Language for Typesetting Three Dimensional Graphics’.
I only have a Paper copy of an article from the UKUUG summer 90 - London,
9-13 July. The authors are: Andrei G. Yaneff and Trevor I. Fenner and
‘Department of computer Science, Birkbeck College, University of London’
as Organization.