Collection of papers on troff and its companions

Chris Noxz

October 16, 2019

The following is a collection based on troff.org/papers. However, I found that many of the links referenced on that site are dead. I have instead downloaded and compiled pdfs from archive.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.

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 W. Kernighan, 1992.
• A Typesetter-Independent TROFF. CSTR #97, Brian W. Kernighan, Bell Labs, 1981, revised March 1982.

macro packages

• 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.
• Using The ‑ms Macros with Troff and Nroff. Michael E. Lesk, 1978.
• Using groff with the ms Macro Package. Larry Kollar & G. Branden Robinson, 2022.

eqn

• Typesetting Mathematics, User’s Guide (Second Edition). Brian W. Kernighan and Lorinda Cherry, 1978.
• 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.

pic

• 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, January 1987. Instrument your programs with graphics.
• DFORMAT – A Program for Typesetting Data Formats. CSTR #142, Jon L. Bentley, Bell Labs, April 1988.
• Making Pictures With GNU PIC. Eric S. Raymond, 1995.
• Drawing with dpic. J. D. Aplevich, 2019.
• Examples of pic Macros W. R. Stevens.

refer

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

tbl

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

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.

MetaPost

• MetaPost with groff.
• The MetaPost System. J. D. Hobby, December 1997.
• Drawing Graphs with MetaPost J. D. Hobby, May 1999.

Miscellaneous

• IDEAL User's Manual. CSTR #103, C. J. Van Wyk, Bell Labs, December 1981. Some interesting ideas about using constraints to describe picture drawing.