Papers on troff and its companions

Home – Papers on troff and its companions

troff.org

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.