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Name | Description | Macro packages | Naming | Inclusion | Writing macros | Authors | See also | COLOPHON |
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groff_tmac(5) File Formats Manual groff_tmac(5)
groff_tmac - macro files in the GNU roff typesetting system
Definitions of macros, strings, and registers for use in a
roff(7) document can be collected into macro files, roff input
files designed to produce no output themselves but instead ease
the preparation of other roff documents. There is no syntactical
difference between a macro file and any other roff document; only
its purpose distinguishes it. When a macro file is installed at
a standard location, named according to a certain convention, and
suitable for use by a general audience, it is termed a macro
package. The “tmac” name originated in early Unix culture as an
abbreviation of “troff macros”.
Macro packages can be loaded by supplying the -m option to
troff(1) or a groff front end. A macro file's name must have the
form name.tmac (or tmac.name) and be placed in a “tmac directory”
to be loadable with the “-m name” option. Section “Environment”
of troff(1) lists these directories. Alternatively, a groff
document requiring a macro file can load it with the mso (“macro
source”) request.
Macro files are named for their most noteworthy application, but
a macro file need not define any macros. It can restrict itself
to defining registers and strings or invoking other groff
requests. It can even be empty.
Encode macro files in ISO 646 (“ASCII”) or either of CCSID (“code
page”) 1047 (on EBCDIC systems) or ISO Latin-1 (8859-1)
(otherwise). soelim(1) by design does not interpret mso
requests, and the encodings used by documents employing a macro
file can vary.
Macro packages come in two varieties; those that assume
responsibility for page layout and other critical functions
(“major” or “full-service”) and those that do not (“supplemental”
or “auxiliary”). GNU roff provides most major macro packages
found in AT&T and BSD Unix systems, an additional full-service
package, and many supplemental packages. Multiple full-service
macro packages cannot be used by the same document. Auxiliary
packages can, in general, be freely combined, though attention to
their use of the groff language name spaces for identifiers
(particularly registers, macros, strings, and diversions) should
be paid. Name space management was a significant challenge in
AT&T troff; groff's support for arbitrarily long identifiers
affords few excuses for name collisions, apart from attempts at
compatibility with the demands of historical documents.
Man pages
Two full-service macro packages are specialized for formatting
Unix reference manuals; they do not support features like
footnotes or multiple columnation.
an constructs man pages in a format introduced by Seventh
Edition Unix (1979). Its macro interface is small, and
the package widely used; see groff_man(7).
doc constructs man pages in a format introduced by 4.3BSD-Reno
(1990). It provides many more features than an, but is
also larger, more complex, and not as widely adopted; see
groff_mdoc(7).
Because readers of man pages often do not know in advance which
macros are used to format a given document, a wrapper is
available.
andoc recognizes a document's use of an or doc and loads the
corresponding macro package. Multiple man pages, in
either format, can be handled; andoc reloads each macro
package as necessary.
Full-service packages
The following packages each support composition of documents of
any kind, from single-page memos to lengthy monographs. They are
similar in functionality; select one that suits your taste.
me originates in 2BSD (1978); see groff_me(7).
mm originates in Programmer's Workbench (PWB) Unix 1.0
(1977); see groff_mm(7).
mom was contributed to groff in 2002, and freely exercises its
many extended features. See groff_mom(7).
ms originates in Sixth Edition Unix (1975); see groff_ms(7).
Localization packages
For Western languages, the localization file sets the hyphenation
mode and loads hyphenation patterns and exceptions. Localization
files can also adjust the date format and provide translations of
strings used by some of the full-service macro packages; alter
the input encoding (see the next section); and change the amount
of additional inter-sentence space. For Eastern languages, the
localization file defines character classes and sets flags on
them. By default, troffrc loads the localization file for
English.
trans loads localized strings used by various macro packages
after their localized forms have been prepared by a
localization macro file.
groff provides the following localization files.
cs Czech; localizes man, me, mm, mom, and ms. Sets the input
encoding to Latin-2 by loading latin2.tmac.
de
den German; localizes man, me, mm, mom, and ms. Sets the
input encoding to Latin-1 by loading latin1.tmac.
de.tmac selects hyphenation patterns for traditional
orthography, and den.tmac does the same for the new
orthography (“Rechtschreibreform”).
en English.
es Spanish; localizes man, me, mm, mom, and ms. Sets the
input encoding to Latin-9 by loading latin9.tmac.
fr French; localizes man, me, mm, mom, and ms. Sets the
input encoding to Latin-9 by loading latin9.tmac.
it Italian; localizes man, me, mm, mom, and ms.
ja Japanese.
ru Russian; localizes man, me, mm, mom, and ms. Sets the
input encoding to KOI8-R by loading koi8-r.tmac.
sv Swedish; localizes man, me, mm, mom, and ms. Sets the
input encoding to Latin-1 by loading latin1.tmac. Some of
the localization of the mm package is handled separately;
see groff_mmse(7).
zh Chinese.
Input encodings
A document that requires one of the following encodings can load
a corresponding macro file.
latin1
latin2
latin5
latin9 support the ISO 8859 Latin-1, Latin-2, Latin-5, and
Latin-9 encodings
cp1047 supports EBCDIC-based systems using CCSID 1047.
koi8-r supports the KOI8-R encoding. KOI8-R code points in the
range 0x80–0x9F are not valid input on systems using ISO
character codings natively; see section “Identifiers” in
groff(7). This should be no impediment to practical
documents, as these KOI8-R code points do not encode
letters, but box-drawing symbols and characters that are
better obtained via special character escape sequences;
see groff_char(7).
Because different input character codes constitute valid GNU
troff input on ISO and EBCDIC systems, the latin and koi8-r macro
files cannot be used on EBCDIC systems, and cp1047 cannot be used
on ISO systems.
Auxiliary packages
The macro packages in this section are not intended for stand-
alone use, but can add functionality to any other macro package
or to plain (“raw”) groff documents.
62bit provides macros for addition, multiplication, and division
of 62-bit integers (allowing safe multiplication of signed
31-bit integers, for example).
hdtbl allows the generation of tables using a syntax similar to
the HTML table model. This Heidelberger table macro
package is not a preprocessor, which can be useful if the
contents of table entries are determined by macro calls or
string interpolations. Compare to tbl(1). It works only
with the ps and pdf output devices. See groff_hdtbl(7).
papersize
enables the paper format to be set on the command line
with the “-d paper=fmt” option to troff. Valid fmts are
the ISO and DIN formats “A0–A6”, “B0–B6”, “C0–C6”, and
“D0–D6”; the U.S. formats “letter”, “legal”, “tabloid”,
“ledger”, “statement”, and “executive”; and the envelope
formats “com10”, “monarch”, and “DL”. All formats, even
those for envelopes, are in portrait orientation: the
longer measurement is vertical. Appending “l” (ell) to
any of these denotes landscape orientation instead. This
macro file assumes one-inch horizontal margins, and sets
registers recognized by the groff man, mdoc, mm, mom, and
ms packages to configure them accordingly. If you want
different margins, you will need to use those packages'
facilities, or troff ll and/or po requests, to adjust
them. An output device typically requires command-line
options -p and -l to override the paper dimensions and
orientation, respectively, defined in its DESC file; see
subsection “Paper format” of groff(1). This macro file is
normally loaded at startup by the troffrc file when
formatting for a typesetter (but not a terminal).
pdfpic provides a single macro, PDFPIC, to include a PDF graphic
in a document using features of the pdf output driver.
For other output devices, PDFPIC calls PSPIC, with which
it shares an interface (see below). This macro file is
normally loaded at startup by the troffrc file.
pic supplies definitions of the macros PS, PE, and PF, usable
with the pic(1) preprocessor. They center each picture.
Use it if your document does not use a full-service macro
package, or that package does not supply working pic macro
definitions. Except for man and mdoc, those provided with
groff already do so (exception: mm employs the name PF for
a different purpose).
pspic provides a macro, PSPIC, that includes a PostScript
graphic in a document. The ps, dvi, html, and xhtml
output devices support such inclusions; for all other
drivers, the image is replaced with a rectangular border
of the same size. pspic.tmac is loaded at startup by the
troffrc file.
Its syntax is as follows.
.PSPIC [-L|-R|-C|-I n] file [width [height]]
file is the name of the PostScript file; width and height
give the desired width and height of the image. If
neither a width nor a height argument is specified, the
image's natural width (as given in the file's bounding
box) or the current line length is used as the width,
whatever is smaller. The width and height arguments may
have scaling units attached; the default scaling unit
is i. PSPIC scales the graphic uniformly in the
horizontal and vertical directions so that it is no more
than width wide and height high. Option -C centers the
graphic horizontally; this is the default. -L and -R
left- and right-align the graphic, respectively. -I
indents the graphic by n (with a default scaling unit
of m).
To use PSPIC within a diversion, we recommend extending it
with the following code, assuring that the diversion's
width completely covers the image's width.
.am PSPIC
. vpt 0
\h'(\\n[ps-offset]u + \\n[ps-deswid]u)'
. sp -1
. vpt 1
..
Failure to load PSPIC's image argument is not an error.
(The psbb request does issue an error diagnostic.) To
make such a failure fatal, append to the pspic*error-hook
macro.
.am pspic*error-hook
. ab
..
ptx provides a macro, xx, to format permuted index entries as
produced by the GNU ptx(1) program. If your formatting
needs differ, copy the macro into your document and adapt
it.
rfc1345
defines special character escape sequences named for the
glyph mnemonics specified in RFC 1345 and the digraph
table of the Vim text editor. See groff_rfc1345(7).
sboxes offers an interface to the “pdf: background” device
control command supported by gropdf(1). Using this
package, groff ms documents can draw colored rectangles
beneath any output.
.BOXSTART SHADED color OUTLINED color INDENT size WEIGHT size
begins a box, where the argument after SHADED gives
the fill color and that after OUTLINED the border
color. Omit the former to get a borderless filled
box and the latter for a border with no fill. The
specified WEIGHT is used if the box is OUTLINED.
INDENT precedes a value that leaves a gap between
the border and the contents inside the box.
Each color must be a defined groff color name, and
each size a valid groff numeric expression. The
keyword/value pairs can be specified in any order.
Boxes can be stacked, so you can start a box within
another box; usually the later boxes would be smaller than
the containing box, but this is not enforced. When using
BOXSTART, the left position is the current indent minus
the INDENT in the command, and the right position is the
left position (calculated above) plus the current line
length and twice the indent.
.BOXSTOP
takes no parameters. It closes the most recently
started box at the current vertical position after
adding its INDENT spacing.
Your groff documents can conditionally exercise the sboxes
macros. The register GSBOX is defined if the package is
loaded, and interpolates a true value if the pdf output
device is in use.
sboxes furthermore hooks into the groff_ms(7) package to
receive notifications when footnotes are growing, so that
it can close boxes on a page before footnotes are printed.
When that condition obtains, sboxes will close open boxes
two points above the footnote separator and re-open them
on the next page. (This amount probably will not match
the box's INDENT.)
See “Using PDF boxes with groff and the ms macros”
⟨file:///usr/local/share/doc/groff-1.23.0/msboxes.pdf⟩ for
a demonstration.
trace aids the debugging of groff documents by tracing macro
calls. See groff_trace(7).
www defines macros corresponding to HTML elements. See
groff_www(7).
AT&T nroff and troff were implemented before the conventions of
the modern C getopt(3) call evolved, and used a naming scheme for
macro packages that looks oddly terse to modern eyes. The
formatter's -m option was the main means of loading a macro
package, and its argument had to follow immediately without
intervening space. This looked like a long option name preceded
by a single minus—a sensation in the computer stone age. Macro
packages therefore came to be known by names that started with
the letter “m”, which was omitted from the name of the macro file
as stored on disk. For example, the manuscript macro package was
stored as tmac.s and loaded with the option -ms. It has since
become conventional in operating systems to use a suffixed file
name extension to suggest a file type or format, thus we see roff
documents with names ending in .man, .me, and so on.
groff commands permit space between an option and its argument.
The syntax “groff -m s” makes the macro file name more clear but
may surprise users familiar with the original convention, unaware
that the package's “real” name was “s” all along. For such
packages of long pedigree, groff accommodates different users'
expectations by supplying wrapper macro files that load the
desired file with mso requests. Thus, all of “groff -m s”,
“groff -m ms”, “groff -ms”, and “groff -mms” serve to load the
manuscript macros.
The traditional method of employing a macro package is to specify
the “-m package” option to the formatter, which then reads
package's macro file prior to any input files. Historically,
package was sought in a file named tmac.package (that is, with a
“tmac.” prefix). GNU troff searches for package.tmac in the
macro path; if not found, it looks for tmac.package instead, and
vice versa.
Alternatively, one could include a macro file with the request
“so file-name”; the argument is resolved as fopen(3) would, from
the current working directory of the formatter. This approach
was inadequate to locate macro packages, since systems stored
them in varying locations. GNU troff offers an improved feature
in the similar request “mso package-file-name”, which searches
the macro path for package-file-name. Because its argument is a
file name, its “.tmac” component must be included for the file to
be found.
If a sourced file requires preprocessing, for example if it
includes tbl tables or eqn equations, the preprocessor soelim(1)
must be used. This can be achieved with a pipeline or by
specifying the -s option to groff(1). man(1) librarian programs
typically run soelim automatically. (As a rule, macro packages
themselves do not require preprocessing.)
A roff(7) document is a text file that is enriched by predefined
formatting constructs, such as requests, escape sequences,
strings, numeric registers, and macros from a macro package.
roff(7) describes these elements.
To give a document a personal style, it is most useful to extend
the existing elements by defining some macros for repeating
tasks; the best place for this is near the beginning of the
document or in a separate file.
Macros without arguments are just like strings. But the full
power of macros occurs when arguments are passed with a macro
call. Within the macro definition, the arguments are available
as the escape sequences \$1, ..., \$9, \$[...], \$*, and \$@, the
name under which the macro was called is in \$0, and the number
of arguments is in register \n[.$]; see groff(7).
Drafting macros
Temporarily disabling the escape mechanism can ease macro
composition; bracket a macro definition with eo and ec requests.
.eo
.ds midpart was called with the following
.de print_args
\f[I]\$0\f[] \*[midpart] \n[.$] arguments:
\$*
..
.ec
This drafting procedure has limitations; it is unsuitable for a
macro that requires certain interpolations at the time it is
defined, or for indirect definitions of identifiers. See section
“Copy mode” of groff(7). In such cases, you might define and
test the macro with the escape character doubled before escape
sequences that are interpreted even in copy mode, then bracket it
with eo and ec requests, un-double the escape characters, then
test again.
Tips for macro definitions
• Use only control lines in macro definitions; that is, start
every input line with a control character. groff's nop
request makes use of text lines unnecessary.
.de Text
. if (\\n[.$] == 0) \
. return
. nop \&\\$*\&
..
• Write a comment macro that works in both draft and non-draft
modes; since the escape character is disabled in draft mode,
trouble might occur when comment escape sequences are used.
For example, the following macro ignores its arguments, so
calling it is a harmless (if somewhat busy) null operation.
.de c
..
.c This is my comment.
• Comment lengthy macro definitions.
• Use empty requests, and indentation after control characters,
to clarify a macro's structure.
This document was written by Werner Lemberg ⟨[email protected]⟩ and G.
Branden Robinson ⟨[email protected]⟩.
Groff: The GNU Implementation of troff, by Trent A. Fisher and
Werner Lemberg, is the primary groff manual. You can browse it
interactively with “info groff”.
groff(1)
is an overview of the groff system.
groff_man(7),
groff_mdoc(7),
groff_me(7),
groff_mm(7),
groff_mom(7),
groff_ms(7),
groff_rfc1345(7),
groff_trace(7),
and
groff_www(7)
are groff macro packages.
groff(7)
summarizes the language recognized by GNU troff.
troff(1)
documents the default macro file search path.
This page is part of the groff (GNU troff) project. Information
about the project can be found at
⟨http://www.gnu.org/software/groff/⟩. If you have a bug report
for this manual page, see ⟨http://www.gnu.org/software/groff/⟩.
This page was obtained from the project's upstream Git repository
⟨https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/groff.git⟩ on 2024-06-14. (At
that time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in
the repository was 2024-06-10.) If you discover any rendering
problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there
is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
(which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
[email protected]
groff 1.23.0.1273-9d53-dirty 6 June 2024 groff_tmac(5)
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HTML rendering created 2024-06-26 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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