The Heirloom Documentation Tools software offers utilities such as troff and nroff to format manual pages. It is a collection of tools designed to handle documentation formatting efficiently.
Heirloom Documentation Tools package is a set of tools consisting of troff, nroff, and other utilities that enable formatting of manual pages and documents to be printed or viewed on terminals. The tools are portable and have been enhanced from the utilities that were originally released by Sun in OpenSolaris. The ditroff, which the tools are a variant of, has historical roots in Unix troff that was responsible for output generated for C/A/T phototypeset.
While nroff is commonly used for formatting Unix manual pages to be viewed on terminals, it is also suited for small system distributions as it consumes only a few system resources. This implementation has been enhanced to generate UTF-8 output.
On the other hand, troff generates PostScript output from the same document source code as nroff, mainly for printing manual pages, but it can also be used as a general-purpose typesetting processor. The implementation now has significant features such as access to PostScript Type 1, OpenType, and TrueType fonts, mechanisms for typesetting small capitals, old-style numerals, missing ligatures, pairwise kerning of characters, and letter space tracking support.
Troff also supports hanging characters that can partially or entirely hang over the right margin, arbitrary size letters, and fractional point sizes with individual fonts zoom, processing text input according to the LC_CTYPE environment variable, and hyphenation of international languages using Raph Levien's LibHnj, based on the TeX method.
Other features of Heirloom Documentation Tools package include configuration of international paper sizes such as A4 and generating PDF distiller instructions for the inclusion of bookmarks, titles, and authorship information using dpost post-processor, to conform to Adobe's Document Structuring Conventions (DSC) with a default resolution raised to 72,000 dpi.
In addition, long names can be used for requests, strings, and number registers, and the tools have undergone fixes and improvements such as fixing spacing for eqn, making the ".warn" request accept full numeric expressions, and making the emulated groff request ".mso" functional in this latest release.
While nroff is commonly used for formatting Unix manual pages to be viewed on terminals, it is also suited for small system distributions as it consumes only a few system resources. This implementation has been enhanced to generate UTF-8 output.
On the other hand, troff generates PostScript output from the same document source code as nroff, mainly for printing manual pages, but it can also be used as a general-purpose typesetting processor. The implementation now has significant features such as access to PostScript Type 1, OpenType, and TrueType fonts, mechanisms for typesetting small capitals, old-style numerals, missing ligatures, pairwise kerning of characters, and letter space tracking support.
Troff also supports hanging characters that can partially or entirely hang over the right margin, arbitrary size letters, and fractional point sizes with individual fonts zoom, processing text input according to the LC_CTYPE environment variable, and hyphenation of international languages using Raph Levien's LibHnj, based on the TeX method.
Other features of Heirloom Documentation Tools package include configuration of international paper sizes such as A4 and generating PDF distiller instructions for the inclusion of bookmarks, titles, and authorship information using dpost post-processor, to conform to Adobe's Document Structuring Conventions (DSC) with a default resolution raised to 72,000 dpi.
In addition, long names can be used for requests, strings, and number registers, and the tools have undergone fixes and improvements such as fixing spacing for eqn, making the ".warn" request accept full numeric expressions, and making the emulated groff request ".mso" functional in this latest release.
What's New
Version 080407: N/A