GNU’s long-running typesetting system gains clearer warnings, new formatting controls, and bug fixes in its latest release.
The release of GNU groff 1.25.0 was announced yesterday. This comes about eight months after the release of GNU groff 1.24.0 in February. The announcement was posted on Sunday to info-gnu@gnu.org and other mailing lists by G. Branden Robinson, the project’s maintainer. Some of you might remember him as Debian’s Project Leader from April 2005 through April 2006.
Groff is GNU’s reimplementation and extension of the classic Unix troff toolchain. Probably best known for its use formatting Unix and Linux manual pages, it’s a typesetting system that uses its own formatting language to turn plain-text documents into PDF, PostScript, HTML, or terminal output. Outside of “Man” pages, it’s used by developers, technical writers, and such to produce technical documentation, reports, and other publications from plain-text source files.
It’s also not entirely used within the tech sector. About three years ago Stephen Ramsay, a professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a faculty fellow at its Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (and an unabashed Linux user), posted an article about it — Beautiful Documents with Groff (Part I) — in which he details his use of GNU groff for formatting what was then his latest book. Part two was published about 1 1/2 years later.
This new release updates groff’s core formatter, GNU troff, with bug fixes, clearer warnings, new commands and registers, and refinements to formatting behavior and compatibility. There are plenty of changes — I count 15 in the “troff” section alone — but I’m not going to go into them all here. You can read Robinson’s entire release email on the GNU website, along with links for installing it.
If you’re an old pro with groff, you can grab it straight from the GNU mirror network, or directly from GNU.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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