1README 2 3The 'groffer' program is the easiest way to read documents written in 4some 'roff' language, such as the 'man pages', the manual pages in 5many operating systems. All 'roff' preprocessors, such as 'chem' or 6'glilypond', are detected and executed automatically. 7 8 9Input 10 11Input comes from either standard input or command-line parameters that 12represent names of exisiting roff files or standardized specifications 13for searching man pages. All of these can be compressed in a format 14that is decompressible by 'gzip' or 'bzip2', including '.gz', 'bz2', 15and '.Z'. 16 17'groffer' has many built-in 'man' functionalities to find and read the 18manual pages on Unix and similar operating systems. It accepts the 19information from an installed 'man' program, but tries to find a man 20path by itself. 21 22'groffer' bundles all filespec parameters into a single output file in 23the same way as 'groff'. The disadvantage of this is that all file 24name arguments must use the same groff language. To change this, the 25option parsing must be revised for large parts. It seems that this 26would create incompatibilities, so the actual option strategy is kept. 27 28 29Output 30 31All input is first sent to 'grog' to determine the necessary 'groff' 32command and then to 'groff' together with all necessary preprocessors. 33So no special 'groff' arguments must be given. But all 'groff' 34options can be specified when this seems to be appropriate. 35 36The following displaying modes for the output are available: 37- Display formatted input with 38-- a PDF viewer, 39-- a Postcript viewer, 40-- a web browser, 41-- the X 'roff' viewer 'gxditview', 42-- a DVI viewer, 43-- a pager in a text terminal (tty). 44- Generate 'groff' output on stdout without a viewer. 45- Generate the 'groff intermediate output' on standard output without 46 postprocessing. 47- Output the source code without any 'groff' processing. 48- There are some information outputs without 'groff' processing, such 49 as by option '-V' and the 'man' like 'whatis' and 'apropos' 50 outputs. 51 52By default, the program creates a PDF file; on non-X text terminals, 53the 'tty' text mode with a pager is tried by default. 54 55 56File access 57 58The Perl version of groffer now uses a umask of 077. This is a very 59strict security issue. It allows only access of the temporary files 60by the file owner. 61 62 63Compatibility 64 65'groffer' is compatible to the 'man' program. It supports '.so' 66requests based on the man path and compressed files. That's more than 67'groff' does. 68 69 70Reporting bugs 71 72For reporting bugs of 'groffer', groff's bug-tracking tool at 73http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=groff can be used. 74 75 76Mailing list 77 78For a general discussion, the mailing list <groff@gnu.org> is 79useful, but one has to subscribe to this list at 80http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/groff. 81 82See the 'README' file in the top directory of the 'groff' source 83package for more details on this mailing list. 84 85 86####### License 87 88Copyright (C) 2003-2018 Free Software Foundation, Inc. 89Written by Bernd Warken <groff-bernd.warken-72@web.de>. 90 91This file is part of 'groffer', which is part of 'groff'. 92 93'groff' is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it 94under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by 95the Free Software Foundation, either version 2 of the License, or 96(at your option) any later version. 97 98'groff' is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT 99ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or 100FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License 101for more details. 102 103You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License 104along with this program. If not, see 105<http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html>. 106 107 108####### Emacs settings 109 110Local Variables: 111mode: text 112End: 113