GROPS - groff output driver for PostScript - man - [phpMan]

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grops(1) General Commands Manual grops(1)

Name
grops - groff output driver for PostScript

Synopsis
grops [-glm] [-b brokenness-flags] [-c num-copies] [-F font-directory] [-I inclusion-
directory] [-p paper-format] [-P prologue-file] [-w rule-thickness] [file ...]

grops --help

grops -v
grops --version

Description
The GNU roff PostScript output driver translates the output of troff(1) into PostScript.
Normally, grops is invoked by groff(1) when the latter is given the “-T ps” option. (In this
installation, ps is the default output device.) Use groff's -P option to pass any options
shown above to grops. If no file arguments are given, or if file is “-”, grotty reads the
standard input stream. Output is written to the standard output stream.

When called with multiple file arguments, grops doesn't produce a valid document structure
(one conforming to the Document Structuring Conventions). To print such concatenated output,
it is necessary to deactivate DSC handling in the printing program or previewer.

See section “Font installation” below for a guide to installing fonts for grops.

Options
--help displays a usage message, while -v and --version show version information; all exit
afterward.

-b n Work around problems with spoolers, previewers, and older printers. Normally, grops
produces output at PostScript LanguageLevel 2 that conforms to version 3.0 of the Doc‐
ument Structuring Conventions. Some software and devices can't handle such a data
stream. The value of n determines what grops does to make its output acceptable to
such consumers. If n is 0, grops employs no workarounds, which is the default; it can
be changed by modifying the broken directive in grops's DESC file.

Add 1 to suppress generation of %%BeginDocumentSetup and %%EndDocumentSetup comments;
this is needed for early versions of TranScript that get confused by anything between
the %%EndProlog comment and the first %%Page comment.

Add 2 to omit lines in included files beginning with %!, which confuse Sun's pageview
previewer.

Add 4 to omit lines in included files beginning with %%Page, %%Trailer and %%End‐
Prolog; this is needed for spoolers that don't understand %%BeginDocument and %%End‐
Document comments.

Add 8 to write %!PS-Adobe-2.0 rather than %!PS-Adobe-3.0 as the first line of the
PostScript output; this is needed when using Sun's Newsprint with a printer that re‐
quires page reversal.

Add 16 to omit media size information (that is, output neither a %%DocumentMedia com‐
ment nor the setpagedevice PostScript command). This was the behavior of groff 1.18.1
and earlier; it is needed for older printers that don't understand PostScript
LanguageLevel 2, and is also necessary if the output is further processed to produce
an EPS file; see subsection “Escapsulated PostScript” below.

-c n Output n copies of each page.

-F dir Prepend directory dir/devname to the search path for font and device description and
PostScript prologue files; name is the name of the device, usually ps.

-g Generate PostScript code to guess the page length. The guess is correct only if the
imageable area is vertically centered on the page. This option allows you to generate
documents that can be printed on both U.S. letter and A4 paper formats without change.

-I dir Search the directory dir for files named in \X'ps: file' and \X'ps: import' escape se‐
quences. -I may be specified more than once; each dir is searched in the given order.
To search the current working directory before others, add “-I .” at the desired
place; it is otherwise searched last.

-l Use landscape orientation rather than portrait.

-m Turn on manual feed for the document.

-p fmt Set physical dimensions of output medium, overriding the papersize, paperlength, and
paperwidth directives in the DESC file. fmt can be any argument accepted by the
papersize directive; see groff_font(5).

-P prologue
Use the file prologue, sought in the groff font search path, as the PostScript pro‐
logue, overriding the default (see section “Files” below) and the environment variable
GROPS_PROLOGUE.

-w n Draw rules (lines) with a thickness of n thousandths of an em. The default thickness
is 40 (0.04 em).

Usage
The input to grops must be in the format output by troff(1), described in groff_out(5). In
addition, the device and font description files for the device used must meet certain re‐
quirements. The device resolution must be an integer multiple of 72 times the sizescale.
The device description file must contain a valid paper format; see groff_font(5). Each font
description file must contain a directive
internalname psname
which says that the PostScript name of the font is psname.

A font description file may also contain a directive
encoding enc-file
which says that the PostScript font should be reencoded using the encoding described in enc-
file; this file should consist of a sequence of lines of the form
pschar code
where pschar is the PostScript name of the character, and code is its position in the encod‐
ing expressed as a decimal integer; valid values are in the range 0 to 255. Lines starting
with # and blank lines are ignored. The code for each character given in the font descrip‐
tion file must correspond to the code for the character in encoding file, or to the code in
the default encoding for the font if the PostScript font is not to be reencoded. This code
can be used with the \N escape sequence in troff to select the character, even if it does not
have a groff glyph name. Every character in the font description file must exist in the
PostScript font, and the widths given in the font description file must match the widths used
in the PostScript font. grops assumes that a character with a groff name of space is blank
(makes no marks on the page); it can make use of such a character to generate more efficient
and compact PostScript output.

grops is able to display all glyphs in a PostScript font; it is not limited to 256 of them.
enc-file (or the default encoding if no encoding file is specified) just defines the order of
glyphs for the first 256 characters; all other glyphs are accessed with additional encoding
vectors which grops produces on the fly.

grops can embed fonts in a document that are necessary to render it; this is called “down‐
loading”. Such fonts must be in PFA format. Use pfbtops(1) to convert a Type 1 font in PFB
format. Downloadable fonts must be listed a download file containing lines of the form
psname file
where psname is the PostScript name of the font, and file is the name of the file containing
it; lines beginning with # and blank lines are ignored; fields may be separated by tabs or
spaces. file is sought using the same mechanism as that for groff font description files.
The download file itself is also sought using this mechanism; currently, only the first
matching file found in the device and font description search path is used.

If the file containing a downloadable font or imported document conforms to the Adobe Docu‐
ment Structuring Conventions, then grops interprets any comments in the files sufficiently to
ensure that its own output is conforming. It also supplies any needed font resources that
are listed in the download file as well as any needed file resources. It is also able to
handle inter-resource dependencies. For example, suppose that you have a downloadable font
called Garamond, and also a downloadable font called Garamond-Outline which depends on Gara‐
mond (typically it would be defined to copy Garamond's font dictionary, and change the Paint‐
Type), then it is necessary for Garamond to appear before Garamond-Outline in the PostScript
document. grops handles this automatically provided that the downloadable font file for
Garamond-Outline indicates its dependence on Garamond by means of the Document Structuring
Conventions, for example by beginning with the following lines.
%!PS-Adobe-3.0 Resource-Font
%%DocumentNeededResources: font Garamond
%%EndComments
%%IncludeResource: font Garamond
In this case, both Garamond and Garamond-Outline would need to be listed in the download
file. A downloadable font should not include its own name in a %%DocumentSuppliedResources
comment.

grops does not interpret %%DocumentFonts comments. The %%DocumentNeededResources,
%%DocumentSuppliedResources, %%IncludeResource, %%BeginResource, and %%EndResource comments
(or possibly the old %%DocumentNeededFonts, %%DocumentSuppliedFonts, %%IncludeFont, %%Begin‐
Font, and %%EndFont comments) should be used.

The default stroke and fill color is black. For colors defined in the “rgb” color space,
setrgbcolor is used; for “cmy” and “cmyk”, setcmykcolor; and for “gray”, setgray. setcmyk‐
color is a PostScript LanguageLevel 2 command and thus not available on some older printers.

Typefaces
Styles called R, I, B, and BI mounted at font positions 1 to 4. Text fonts are grouped into
families A, BM, C, H, HN, N, P, and T, each having members in each of these styles.

AR AvantGarde-Book
AI AvantGarde-BookOblique
AB AvantGarde-Demi
ABI AvantGarde-DemiOblique
BMR Bookman-Light
BMI Bookman-LightItalic
BMB Bookman-Demi
BMBI Bookman-DemiItalic
CR Courier
CI Courier-Oblique
CB Courier-Bold
CBI Courier-BoldOblique
HR Helvetica
HI Helvetica-Oblique
HB Helvetica-Bold
HBI Helvetica-BoldOblique
HNR Helvetica-Narrow
HNI Helvetica-Narrow-Oblique
HNB Helvetica-Narrow-Bold
HNBI Helvetica-Narrow-BoldOblique
NR NewCenturySchlbk-Roman
NI NewCenturySchlbk-Italic
NB NewCenturySchlbk-Bold
NBI NewCenturySchlbk-BoldItalic
PR Palatino-Roman
PI Palatino-Italic
PB Palatino-Bold
PBI Palatino-BoldItalic
TR Times-Roman
TI Times-Italic
TB Times-Bold
TBI Times-BoldItalic

Another text font is not a member of a family.

ZCMI ZapfChancery-MediumItalic

Special fonts include S, the PostScript Symbol font; ZD, Zapf Dingbats; SS (slanted symbol),
which contains oblique forms of lowercase Greek letters derived from Symbol; EURO, which of‐
fers a Euro glyph for use with old devices lacking it; and ZDR, a reversed version of ZapfD‐
ingbats (with symbols flipped about the vertical axis). Most glyphs in these fonts are un‐
named and must be accessed using \N. The last three are not standard PostScript fonts, but
supplied by groff and therefore included in the default download file.

Device control commands
grops recognizes device control commands produced by the \X escape sequence, but interprets
only those that begin with a “ps:” tag.

\X'ps: exec code'
Execute the arbitrary PostScript commands code. The PostScript currentpoint is set to
the groff drawing position when the \X escape sequence is interpreted before executing
code. The origin is at the top left corner of the page; x coordinates increase to the
right, and y coordinates down the page. A procedure u is defined that converts groff
basic units to the coordinate system in effect (provided the user doesn't change the
scale). For example,
.nr x 1i
\X'ps: exec \nx u 0 rlineto stroke'
draws a horizontal line one inch long. code may make changes to the graphics state,
but any changes persist only to the end of the page. A dictionary containing the def‐
initions specified by the def and mdef commands is on top of the dictionary stack. If
your code adds definitions to this dictionary, you should allocate space for them us‐
ing “\X'ps: mdef n'”. Any definitions persist only until the end of the page. If you
use the \Y escape sequence with an argument that names a macro, code can extend over
multiple lines. For example,
.nr x 1i
.de y
ps: exec
\nx u 0 rlineto
stroke
..
\Yy
is another way to draw a horizontal line one inch long. The single backslash before
“nx”—the only reason to use a register while defining the macro “y”—is to convert a
user-specified dimension “1i” to groff basic units which are in turn converted to
PostScript units with the u procedure.

grops wraps user-specified PostScript code into a dictionary, nothing more. In par‐
ticular, it doesn't start and end the inserted code with save and restore, respec‐
tively. This must be supplied by the user, if necessary.

\X'ps: file name'
This is the same as the exec command except that the PostScript code is read from file
name.

\X'ps: def code'
Place a PostScript definition contained in code in the prologue. There should be at
most one definition per \X command. Long definitions can be split over several \X
commands; all the code arguments are simply joined together separated by newlines.
The definitions are placed in a dictionary which is automatically pushed on the dic‐
tionary stack when an exec command is executed. If you use the \Y escape sequence
with an argument that names a macro, code can extend over multiple lines.

\X'ps: mdef n code'
Like def, except that code may contain up to n definitions. grops needs to know how
many definitions code contains so that it can create an appropriately sized PostScript
dictionary to contain them.

\X'ps: import file llx lly urx ury width [height]'
Import a PostScript graphic from file. The arguments llx, lly, urx, and ury give the
bounding box of the graphic in the default PostScript coordinate system. They should
all be integers: llx and lly are the x and y coordinates of the lower left corner of
the graphic; urx and ury are the x and y coordinates of the upper right corner of the
graphic; width and height are integers that give the desired width and height in groff
basic units of the graphic.

The graphic is scaled so that it has this width and height and translated so that the
lower left corner of the graphic is located at the position associated with \X com‐
mand. If the height argument is omitted it is scaled uniformly in the x and y axes so
that it has the specified width.

The contents of the \X command are not interpreted by troff, so vertical space for the
graphic is not automatically added, and the width and height arguments are not allowed
to have attached scaling indicators.

If the PostScript file complies with the Adobe Document Structuring Conventions and
contains a %%BoundingBox comment, then the bounding box can be automatically extracted
from within groff input by using the psbb request.

See groff_tmac(5) for a description of the PSPIC macro which provides a convenient
high-level interface for inclusion of PostScript graphics.

\X'ps: invis'
\X'ps: endinvis'
No output is generated for text and drawing commands that are bracketed with these \X
commands. These commands are intended for use when output from troff is previewed be‐
fore being processed with grops; if the previewer is unable to display certain charac‐
ters or other constructs, then other substitute characters or constructs can be used
for previewing by bracketing them with these \X commands.

For example, gxditview is not able to display a proper \[em] character because the
standard X11 fonts do not provide it; this problem can be overcome by executing the
following request

.char \[em] \X'ps: invis'\
\Z'\v'-.25m'\h'.05m'\D'l .9m 0'\h'.05m''\
\X'ps: endinvis'\[em]

In this case, gxditview is unable to display the \[em] character and draws the line,
whereas grops prints the \[em] character and ignores the line (this code is already in
file Xps.tmac, which is loaded if a document intended for grops is previewed with
gxditview).

If a PostScript procedure BPhook has been defined via a “ps: def” or “ps: mdef” device con‐
trol command, it is executed at the beginning of every page (before anything is drawn or
written by groff). For example, to underlay the page contents with the word “DRAFT” in light
gray, you might use

.de XX
ps: def
/BPhook
{ gsave .9 setgray clippath pathbbox exch 2 copy
.5 mul exch .5 mul translate atan rotate pop pop
/NewCenturySchlbk-Roman findfont 200 scalefont setfont
(DRAFT) dup stringwidth pop -.5 mul -70 moveto show
grestore }
def
..
.devicem XX

Or, to cause lines and polygons to be drawn with square linecaps and mitered linejoins in‐
stead of the round linecaps and linejoins normally used by grops, use
.de XX
ps: def
/BPhook { 2 setlinecap 0 setlinejoin } def
..
.devicem XX
(square linecaps, as opposed to butt linecaps (“0 setlinecap”), give true corners in boxed
tables even though the lines are drawn unconnected).

Encapsulated PostScript
grops itself doesn't emit bounding box information. The following script, groff2eps, pro‐
duces an EPS file.

#! /bin/sh
groff -P-b16 "$1" > "$1".ps
gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=bbox -- "$1".ps 2> "$1".bbox
sed -e "/^%%Orientation/r $1.bbox" \
-e "/^%!PS-Adobe-3.0/s/$/ EPSF-3.0/" "$1".ps > "$1".eps
rm "$1".ps "$1".bbox

You can then use “groff2eps foo” to convert file foo to foo.eps.

TrueType and other font formats
TrueType fonts can be used with grops if converted first to Type 42 format, a PostScript
wrapper equivalent to the PFA format described in pfbtops(1). Several methods exist to gen‐
erate a Type 42 wrapper; some of them involve the use of a PostScript interpreter such as
Ghostscript—see gs(1).

One approach is to use FontForge, a font editor that can convert most outline font formats.
Here's an example of using the Roboto Slab Serif font with groff. Several variables are used
so that you can more easily adapt it into your own script.

MAP=/usr/share/groff/1.23.0/font/devps/generate/text.map
TTF=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/roboto/slab/RobotoSlab-Regular.ttf
BASE=$(basename "$TTF")
INT=${BASE%.ttf}
PFA=$INT.pfa
AFM=$INT.afm
GFN=RSR
DIR=$HOME/.local/groff/font
mkdir -p "$DIR"/devps
fontforge -lang=ff -c "Open(\"$TTF\");\
Generate(\"$DIR/devps/$PFA\");"
afmtodit "$DIR/devps/$AFM" "$MAP" "$DIR/devps/$GFN"
printf "$BASE\t$PFA\n" >> "$DIR/devps/download"

fontforge and afmtodit may generate warnings depending on the attributes of the font. The
test procedure is simple.

printf ".ft RSR\nHello, world!\n" | groff -F "$DIR" > hello.ps

Once you're satisfied that the font works, you may want to generate any available related
styles (for instance, Roboto Slab also has “Bold”, “Light”, and “Thin” styles) and set up
GROFF_FONT_PATH in your environment to include the directory you keep the generated fonts in
so that you don't have to use the -F option.

Font installation
The following is a step-by-step font installation guide for grops.

• Convert your font to something groff understands. This is a PostScript Type 1 font in PFA
format or a PostScript Type 42 font, together with an AFM file. A PFA file begins as fol‐
lows.
%!PS-AdobeFont-1.0:
A PFB file contains this string as well, preceded by some non-printing bytes. If your font
is in PFB format, use groff's pfbtops(1) program to convert it to PFA. For TrueType and
other font formats, we recommend fontforge, which can convert most outline font formats. A
Type 42 font file begins as follows.
%!PS-TrueTypeFont
This is a wrapper format for TrueType fonts. Old PostScript printers might not support
them (that is, they might not have a built-in TrueType font interpreter). In the following
steps, we will consider the use of CTAN's BrushScriptX-Italic font in PFA format.

• Convert the AFM file to a groff font description file with the afmtodit(1) program. For
instance,
$ afmtodit BrushScriptX-Italic.afm text.map BSI
converts the Adobe Font Metric file BrushScriptX-Italic.afm to the groff font description
file BSI.

If you have a font family which provides regular upright (roman), bold, italic, and bold-
italic styles (where “italic” may be “oblique” or “slanted”), we recommend using the let‐
ters R, B, I, and BI, respectively, as suffixes to the groff font family name to enable
groff's font family and style selection features. An example is groff's built-in support
for Times: the font family name is abbreviated as T, and the groff font names are therefore
TR, TB, TI, and TBI. In our example, however, the BrushScriptX font is available in a sin‐
gle style only, italic.

• Install the groff font description file(s) in a devps subdirectory in the search path that
groff uses for device and font file descriptions. See the GROFF_FONT_PATH entry in section
“Environment” of troff(1) for the current value of the font search path. While groff
doesn't directly use AFM files, it is a good idea to store them alongside its font descrip‐
tion files.

• Register fonts in the devps/download file so they can be located for embedding in Post‐
Script files grops generates. Only the first download file encountered in the font search
path is read. If in doubt, copy the default download file (see section “Files” below) to
the first directory in the font search path and add your fonts there. The PostScript font
name used by grops is stored in the internalname field in the groff font description file.
(This name does not necessarily resemble the font's file name.) We add the following line
to download.
BrushScriptX-Italic→BrushScriptX-Italic.pfa
A tab character, depicted as →, separates the fields.

• Test the selection and embedding of the new font.
printf "\\f[BSI]Hello, world!\n" | groff -T ps -P -e >hello.ps
see hello.pdf

Old fonts
groff versions 1.19.2 and earlier contained descriptions of a slightly different set of the
base 35 PostScript level 2 fonts defined by Adobe. The older set has 229 glyphs and a larger
set of kerning pairs; the newer one has 314 glyphs and includes the Euro glyph. For back‐
wards compatibility, these old font descriptions are also installed in the /usr/share/groff/
1.23.0/oldfont/devps directory.

To use them, make sure that grops finds the fonts before the default system fonts (with the
same names): either give grops the -F command-line option,
$ groff -Tps -P-F -P/usr/share/groff/1.23.0/oldfont ...
or add the directory to groff's font and device description search path environment variable,
$ GROFF_FONT_PATH=/usr/share/groff/1.23.0/oldfont \
groff -Tps ...
when the command runs.

Environment
GROFF_FONT_PATH
A list of directories in which to seek the selected output device's directory of de‐
vice and font description files. See troff(1) and groff_font(5).

GROPS_PROLOGUE
If this is set to foo, then grops uses the file foo (in the font path) instead of the
default prologue file prologue. The option -P overrides this environment variable.

SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH
A timestamp (expressed as seconds since the Unix epoch) to use as the output creation
timestamp in place of the current time. The time is converted to human-readable form
using gmtime(3) and asctime(3), and recorded in a PostScript comment.

TZ The time zone to use when converting the current time to human-readable form; see
tzset(3). If SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH is used, it is always converted to human-readable form
using UTC.

Files
/usr/share/groff/1.23.0/font/devps/DESC
describes the ps output device.

/usr/share/groff/1.23.0/font/devps/F
describes the font known as F on device ps.

/usr/share/groff/1.23.0/font/devps/download
lists fonts available for embedding within the PostScript document (or download to the
device).

/usr/share/groff/1.23.0/font/devps/prologue
is the default PostScript prologue prefixed to every output file.

/usr/share/groff/1.23.0/font/devps/text.enc
describes the encoding scheme used by most PostScript Type 1 fonts; the encoding di‐
rective of font description files for the ps device refers to it.

/usr/share/groff/1.23.0/tmac/ps.tmac
defines macros for use with the ps output device. It is automatically loaded by trof‐
frc when the ps output device is selected.

/usr/share/groff/1.23.0/tmac/pspic.tmac
defines the PSPIC macro for embedding images in a document; see groff_tmac(5). It is
automatically loaded by troffrc.

/usr/share/groff/1.23.0/tmac/psold.tmac
provides replacement glyphs for text fonts that lack complete coverage of the ISO
Latin-1 character set; using it, groff can produce glyphs like eth (ð) and thorn (þ)
that older PostScript printers do not natively support.

grops creates temporary files using the template “gropsXXXXXX”; see groff(1) for details on
their storage location.

See also
PostScript Language Document Structuring Conventions Specification

afmtodit(1), groff(1), troff(1), pfbtops(1), groff_char(7), groff_font(5), groff_out(5),
groff_tmac(5)

groff 1.23.0 31 March 2024 grops(1)

man > GROPS