README file for the Heirloom Documentation Tools

The Heirloom Documentation Tools provide troff, nroff, and related
utilities to format manual pages and other documents for output on
terminals and printers. They are portable and enhanced versions of
the utilities released by Sun as part of OpenSolaris, and, for pic,
grap, mpm, and some minor parts, by Lucent as part of Plan 9.

nroff is most prominently used to format Unix manual pages for viewing
them on a terminal. This implementation consumes relatively few system
resources and is thus suitable for small system distributions. It has
been enhanced to generate UTF-8 output.

troff generates typesetter output from the same document source code as
nroff. Thus a special use of it is to prepare manual pages for printing.
troff is a general-purpose typesetting processor, though. Significant
features have been added in this implementation; see the "Nroff/Troff
User's Manual", "Font Handling in Troff with PostScript Devices", and
"Justification in Heirloom Troff" for details. All documents are
included in the "doc" subdirectory of the source code distribution;
compiled PDF files can be downloaded from the project home page.

Currently, troff is almost exclusively targeted at generating output
for PostScript interpreters. Its principal device independence has
been retained, though; the intermediate output language is largely
unchanged. The troff driver for the Autologic APS-5 is still included.
It is untested since it would be surprising to find a phototypesetter
of this type that is still in use, but serves as an experimentation
aid for device independence.

The source code has been compiled successfully on:

Linux glibc, diet libc
Solaris 9 and above
HP-UX B.11.11 and above
AIX 5.1
FreeBSD 5.4, 6.1
NetBSD 2.0, 3.0
DragonFlyBSD 1.3.7-DEVELOPMENT
Mac OS X 10.4.3

New releases of this project are announced on Freshmeat. If you want to
get notified by email on each release, use their subscription service at
http://freshmeat.net/projects/doctools/.

To build and install the RPM package:

• Build and install the "heirloom-devtools" package available from
  http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/devtools.html.

• Execute "rpmbuild -tb heirloom-doctools-.tar.bz2". The
  result can be found in /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386 (or likewise)
  and can be installed using "rpm -U".

To build and install manually:

• Build and install the "heirloom-devtools" package if necessary
  (see below).

• Adjust the installation paths and compiler settings in the file
  "mk.config", which is in makefile syntax.

• Execute "make", followed by "make install". "make mrproper" will
  destroy all generated files.

troff currently reads several binary files which are built during
the compilation process. It is thus not possible to cross-compile.

The locale-dependent character input in troff assumes that the C library
represents wchar_t values as Unicode characters. This is the case on any
modern Unix system.

The "pm" utility requires a C++ compiler. If such a compiler is not
available, delete the "mpm" directory from the list of subdirectories
to build in the top-level "makefile". The "pm" utility is rarely used,
so it should not be too dramatic if it is missing.

Several of the included yacc and lex programs need to access internals
of the yacc and lex implementations beyond the respective POSIX
specifications. This has been made to work with Unix yacc and lex as
well as with many versions of Berkeley yacc, bison, and flex. However,
recent changes in these programs may result in incompatibilities. If
this happens, install the "Heirloom Development Tools" package first
and use the yacc and lex versions provided with it. You could also fix
the problem on your own, but now that portable Open Source versions of
Unix yacc and lex are available, such changes can no longer be
considered important, and will not be done as part of the regular
maintenance of this project.

In order to use the utilities for formatting manual pages, note the
following:

• You will normally want to use "nroff -Tlp". By default, nroff generates
  output for a Teletype Model 37 with half-line capabilities which will
  lead to weird results with any xterm or CRT terminal.

• Another choice is "nroff -Tlocale". This will generate UTF-8 output if
  permitted by the current setting of the LC_CTYPE locale, and the same
  as "nroff -Tlp" otherwise. UTF-8 output looks nicer and helps to spot
  out typesetting errors in manual pages like using "-" instead of "-",
  so it is recommended for developers. (End users might prefer to wait
  some time until more of the many pages which do this wrong have been
  fixed.)

• Macro names are normally restricted to two characters for compatibility
  with previous versions of nroff. With "nroff -mg", long macro names and
  other groff extensions are accepted. You will normally want to enable this
  because you are much more likely to encounter manual pages written with
  groff in mind than manual pages that require strict Unix compatibility.

• You need to filter the output of nroff through "col -x".

• The terminal descriptions for "-Tlp" and "-Tlocale" are built-in with
  nroff. For a small system distribution, it is thus not necessary to
  install the "nterm" directory.

• You need at least the "an" macro file to format manual pages. If
  you also want to use the Berkeley "doc" macros, you also need
  "doc*" and "andoc". "nroff -mandoc" will then switch automatically
  between the two macro packages.

• Heirloom nroff can optimize line breaking over whole paragraphs.
  This results in fewer ugly holes of successive spaces in the output.
  To enable it with manual pages, add "-mpadj" to the command line.

• It is recommended that the "-msafe" macro package is used when
  viewing manual pages. It will remove those requests that allow to
  call programs or to write to files. If your man command runs with
  privileges, you then also need to ensure that the "TROFFMACS"
  environment variable is unset when nroff is executed. Otherwise,
  a malicious user might replace the "safe" macro package with his
  own version.

• Thus a complete pipeline to format manual pages for viewing is:
  tbl input.1 | neqn | nroff -Tlp -mg -msafe -mpadj -mandoc | col -x

• If you like italic text to appear underlined and boldfaced text to
  appear bold on a CRT or X Window System terminal, also add a call
  to the "ul" filter:
  tbl input.1 | neqn | nroff -Tlp -mg -msafe -mpadj -mandoc | col -x | ul

• To print manual pages with troff, use
  tbl input.1 | eqn | troff -mg -msafe -mpadj -mandoc | dpost | lp

• You should of course configure your "man" command such that it
  executes these pipelines automatically for you. For the "man"
  command from the Heirloom Toolchest, suitable entries in
  "/etc/default/man" are:

  NROFF=/usr/ucb/nroff -Tlocale -mg -msafe -mpadj
  TROFF=/usr/ucb/troff -mg -msafe -mpadj
  TBL=/usr/ucb/tbl
  EQN=/usr/ucb/eqn
  NEQN=/usr/ucb/neqn
  TCAT=/usr/ucb/dpost
  COL=col -x | ul
  MACSET=-mandoc

The project homepage is currently at http://heirloom.sourceforge.net.

Report bugs to

Gunnar Ritter
Freiburg i. Br.
Germany
http://heirloom.sourceforge.net
gunnarr@acm.org 01/12/07