groff

• XHTML support has been added to grohtml and can be specified by −Txhtml. This option also utilizes the MathML capability of eqn and combines the outputs of both in the final XHTML file. Users can also specify the ‘−P−V’ option together with ‘−Txhtml’ in groff. This has the effect of creating an XHTML validator button at the bottom of each page.

• Some options have been added to control a new preprocessor, ‘preconv’ (see below): ‘−k’ activates it, ‘−K’ sets the input encoding, and ‘−D’ sets the default encoding.

• A new environment variable ‘GROFF_ENCODING’ sets the encoding of input files; it implies command option ‘−k’.

troff

• Two new requests ‘device’ and ‘devicem’ have been added which are equivalents to the \X and \Y escapes, respectively.

• A new read-only number register ‘.br’ is available which is set to 1 if a macro is called as .foo and to 0 if called as ’foo. This allows to reliably modify requests.

  .als bp@orig bp
  .de bp
  .  tm before bp
  .  ie \\n[.br] .bp@orig
  .  el ’bp@orig
  .  tm after bp
  ..

• A new request ‘fzoom’ has been added to adjust the optical size of a font in relation to the others. The zoom factor is given in integer multiples of 1/1000th. In the following example, the CR font is magnified by 10% (the zoom factor is 1.1).

  .fam P
  .fzoom CR 1100
  .ps 12
  Palatino and \f[CR]Courier\f[]

  The new number register ‘.zoom’ holds the zoom value of the current font, in multiples of 1/1000th.

• The ‘cflags’ request has been extended with a new flag value 64, to be used in combination with values 2 (break before character) and 4 (break after character). If set, the hyphenation codes of the surrounding characters are ignored.

• A new debugging request, ‘pev’, has been added to print all of the current known environments to stderr. It first prints the state of the current environment, then iterates through all of the known environments, printing each except the one that is current.

• A new escape ‘\$^’ has been added. It represents the parameters of a macro as if they were an argument to the ‘ds’ request. This is used by ‘trace.tmac’.

• A new read-only number register ‘.O’ is available which returns the current suppression level as set by the ‘\O’ escape.

• The space width emitted by the ‘\|’ and ‘\^’ escape sequences can be controlled on a per-font basis. If there is a glyph named ‘\|’ or ‘\^’, respectively (note the leading backslash), defined in the current font file, use this glyph’s width instead of the default value.

  This behaviour is not new, but hasn’t been documented before.

nroff

• Two new command line options ‘−w’ and ‘−W’ are accepted and passed to groff to enable and disable warning messages, respectively.

preconv

• This is a new preprocessor to convert various input encodings to something groff understands (this is, ASCII and \[uXXXX] entities, with ‘XXXX’ a hexadecimal number with 4 to 6 digits, representing a Unicode input code). Normally, preconv should be invoked with options ‘−k’ and ‘−K’ of groff. See the preconv man page for details.

pic

• int(x) now really behaves as documented: It truncates the non-integer part of x, this is, it rounds towards zero and not towards the next integer less than or equal to x.

• Pic now supports up to 32 macro arguments (and up to 16 on EBCDIC platforms).

• Heinz-Jürgen Örtel contributed code for two new keywords, ‘xslanted’ and ‘yslanted’, which can change the shape of boxes into arbitrary parallelograms.

tbl

• Latest versions of DWB tbl introduced an ‘x’ column specifier for a single column expanded to the line width. GNU tbl has now been extended to support even multiple ‘x’ specifiers within a table.

• To avoid collision with the new ‘x’ specifier, a block formatting macro must now be selected with specifier letter ‘m’.

eqn

• Eric S. Raymond has added a new device type to eqn, MathML. When −TMathML is enabled, eqn now emits MathML formula markup rather than groff commands. The new groff −Txhtml device uses this.

chem

• The preprocessor ‘chem’ was added. ‘chem’ is a roff language to generate chemical structure diagrams. It generates ‘pic’ output.

grops

• The PS font definition files have been regenerated with newer AFM versions from Adobe’s 35 core fonts as present in most Level 2 PS printers. The changes are minor (most notably, the addition of the ‘Euro’ glyph and an extended set of kerning values).

  For backwards compatibility, the old set of font definition files is still available; for details please read the man page of grops.

grotty

• \D’p...’ is now supported if the polygon consists entirely of horizontal and vertical lines.

grohtml

• XHTML support has been added.

• New command line option ‘−V’ (to be used in XHTML mode) to produce an XHTML validator button.

• New command line option ‘−y’ to produce a right-justified groff signature at the end of the document (in combination with option ‘−V’).

gxditview

• Support for keyboard navigation has been improved.

• Similar to other X11 applications, there are now two resource files, ‘GXditview’ and ‘GXditview-color’.

groffer

• ‘groffer’ version 1.* exists now in a shell and a Perl version.

afmtodit

• New option ‘−c’ to output more font information as comments.

• New option ‘−k’ to suppress output of kerning data.

• New option ‘−f NAME’ to set the internal name of the groff font.

macro packages

• Joachim Walsdorff contributed the ‘hdtbl’ package for the generation of tables, using a syntax very similar to the HTML table model. For example, a table with two cells and two rows looks like this:

  .TBL cols=2
  .  TR .TD 1*1 .TD 1*2
  .  TR .TD 2*1 .TD 2*2
  .ETB

  Here the same table using a more expanded syntax:

  .TBL cols=2
  .  TR
  .    TD 1*1
  .    TD 1*2
  .  TR
  .    TD 2*1
  .    TD 2*2
  .ETB

  Tables can be nested; ‘hdtbl’ works without a preprocessor so that the full capability of groff’s macro engine is available.

  This package currently works with ‘−Tps’ only.

• −mandoc now supports multiple man pages (in either man or mdoc format).

• Fabrice Ménard contributed locales support. In particular, it is now possible to get French localization of the main macro packages (−ms, −mm, −me, and −mom, but not −man and −mdoc which are localized differently) by appending ‘-mfr’ to the list of macro packages. Example:

  groff −ms −mfr foo > foo.ps

  Note that latin-9 input encoding is used for French (to support the ‘oe’ ligature).

• Swedish macro localization (with ‘−msv’) has been added.

• German macro localization (with ‘−mde’ and ‘−mden’ for traditional and new orthography, respectively) has been added.

• Czech macro localization (with ‘−mcs’) has been added.

  Note that latin-2 input encoding is used for Czech.

• A new macro ‘Dx’ has been added to the mdoc package which identifies the DragonFly OS.

• If mdoc is used to print multiple man pages (together with the −rcR=0 command line option), each man page now starts a new page.

• −mtrace has been considerably improved, now showing number and string register assignments, among other things. See the groff_trace man page for details.

• The PSPIC macro now works with all devices (producing a hollow rectangle on devices which don’t support inclusion of PS images) and is loaded in troffrc at start-up.

• A new auxiliary macro package ‘62bit’ has been added which provides some macros for adding, multiplying, and dividing signed 62bit integers (mainly to handle normal groff number operations without risking overflow errors).

• For −ms, Eric S. Raymond contributed support for ancient Bell Labs localisms ‘.SC’, ‘.UC’, ‘.P1’, and ‘.P2’. The latter three are enabled only after .SC is called.

• A new string, ‘SN-STYLE’, has been added to the ms macros, controlling the formatting of section numbers in headings defined by ‘.NH’.

• The new macro package ‘ptx’ provides a template definition for the ‘.xx’ macro as needed by GNU ptx (for creating permuted indices).