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Name | Synopsis | Description | Options | Usage | Font installation | Old fonts | Exit status | Environment | Files | See also | COLOPHON |
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grops(1) General Commands Manual grops(1)
grops - groff output driver for PostScript
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
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. It writes 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 catenated 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.
--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
Document 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 %%EndProlog; 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 requires
page reversal.
Add 16 to omit media size information (that is, output
neither a %%DocumentMedia comment 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 sequences. -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 prologue, 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).
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
requirements. 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 encoding 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
description 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 “downloading”. 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. Blank lines and those beginning
with # are ignored; fields are separated by tabs. file is sought
using the same mechanism as for groff font description files. The
download file itself is as well; currently, 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 Document 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 Garamond (typically it would be
defined to copy Garamond's font dictionary, and change the
PaintType), 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, %%Include‐
Resource, %%BeginResource, and %%EndResource comments (or possibly
the old %%DocumentNeededFonts, %%DocumentSuppliedFonts, %%Include‐
Font, %%BeginFont, and %%EndFont comments) should be used.
The default stroke and fill colors are black. For colors defined
in the “rgb” color space, setrgbcolor is used; for “cmy” and
“cmyk”, setcmykcolor; and for “gray”, setgray. setcmykcolor 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 offers a
Euro glyph for use with old devices lacking it; and ZDR, a
reversed version of Zapf Dingbats (with symbols flipped about the
vertical axis). Most glyphs in these fonts are unnamed 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.
grops furthermore supports a naming scheme for East Asian
typefaces shared with grohtml(1), gropdf(1), and grotty(1).
CSH Simplified Chinese, Hei style
CSS Simplified Chinese, Song style
CTH Traditional Chinese, Hei style
CTS Traditional Chinese, Song style
JPG Japanese, Gothic style
JPM Japanese, Mincho style
KOG Korean, Gothic style
KOM Korean, Mincho style
Device extension commands
grops recognizes device extension commands produced by the groff
request device or roff \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
definitions 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
using “\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 particular, it doesn't start
and end the inserted code with save and restore,
respectively. 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 dictionary
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 command. 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 before
being processed with grops; if the previewer is unable to
display certain characters 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 with 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 extension 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 the following.
.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 instead of the round linecaps and linejoins
normally used by grops, use the following.
.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, produces 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 "$1".bbox
You can then use “groff2eps foo” to convert file foo to foo.eps.
TrueType and other font formats
To use TrueType fonts with grops, convert them first to Type 42
format, a PostScript wrapper equivalent to the PFA format
described in pfbtops(1). Several methods exist to generate a
Type 42 wrapper; some of them involve the use of a PostScript
interpreter such as Ghostscript—see gs(1).
FontForge ⟨https://fontforge.org/⟩ converts most outline font
formats. Here's how we'd set up Roboto Slab Serif for use with
groff.
MAP=/usr/local/share/groff/1.23.0/font/devps/generate/text.map
TTF=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/roboto/slab/RobotoSlab-Regular.ttf
BASE=$(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" >> "$DIR/devps/download"
fontforge and afmtodit may produce warnings depending on font file
attributes. Test the font as follows.
printf ".ft RSR\nHello, world!\n" | groff -F "$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.
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 follows.
%!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
⟨https://ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/brushscr⟩ 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 letters
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 single 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 description
files.
• Register fonts in the devps/download file so they can be
located for embedding in PostScript 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 >hello.ps
see hello.pdf
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 314 glyphs and a larger set
of kerning pairs; the newer one has only 229 glyphs, but includes
the Euro sign. For backward compatibility, these old font
descriptions are also installed in the /usr/local/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/local/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/local/share/groff/1.23.0/oldfont \
groff -Tps ...
when the command runs.
grops exits with status 0 on successful operation, status 2 if the
program cannot interpret its command-line arguments, and status 1
if it encounters an error during operation.
GROFF_FONT_PATH
A list of directories in which to seek the selected output
device's directory of device 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.
/usr/local/share/groff/1.23.0/font/devps/DESC
describes the ps output device.
/usr/local/share/groff/1.23.0/font/devps/F
describes the font known as F on device ps.
/usr/local/share/groff/1.23.0/font/devps/download
lists fonts available for embedding within the PostScript
document (or download to the device).
/usr/local/share/groff/1.23.0/font/devps/prologue
is the default PostScript prologue prefixed to every output
file.
/usr/local/share/groff/1.23.0/font/devps/text.enc
describes the encoding scheme used by most PostScript
Type 1 fonts; the encoding directive of font description
files for the ps device refers to it.
/usr/local/share/groff/1.23.0/tmac/ps.tmac
defines macros for use with the ps output device. It is
automatically loaded by troffrc when the ps output device
is selected.
/usr/local/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/local/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).
PostScript Language Document Structuring Conventions Specification
⟨http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/ps/5001.DSC_Spec
.pdf⟩
afmtodit(1), groff(1), troff(1), pfbtops(1), groff_char(7),
groff_font(5), groff_out(5), groff_tmac(5)
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 2025-08-11. (At
that time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in
the repository was 2025-08-09.) 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 1.23.0.3821-a8b3f 2025-08-09 grops(1)
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