grops(1) General Commands Manual grops(1)
Name
grops - groff output driver for PostScript
Synopsis
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
Description
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.
Options
--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 %%EndDocument 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).
Usage
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,
%%IncludeResource, %%BeginResource, and %%EndResource comments (or
possibly the old %%DocumentNeededFonts, %%DocumentSuppliedFonts,
%%IncludeFont, %%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 "$1".bbox
You can then use "groff2eps foo" to convert file foo to foo.eps.
TrueType and other font formats
To use TrueType fonts with grops, convert them first to Type 42 format,
a PostScript wrapper equivalent to the PFA format described in
pfbtops(1). Several methods exist to generate a Type 42 wrapper; some
of them involve the use of a PostScript interpreter such as
Ghostscript--see gs(1).
FontForge <https://fontforge.org/> converts most outline font formats.
Here's how we'd set up Roboto Slab Serif for use with groff.
MAP=/opt/local/share/groff/1.24.1/font/devps/generate/text.map
TTF=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/roboto/slab/RobotoSlab-Regular.ttf
BASE=$(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.
Font installation
For your convenience, groff offers install-font.bash, a shell script
that interactively assists the configuration of fonts for use with the
GNU troff formatter and the grops output driver. See section "Files"
below.
The following is a step-by-step font installation guide for grops.
o 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.
o 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.
o 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.
o 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.
o Test the selection and embedding of the new font.
printf "\\f[BSI]Hello, world!\n" | groff -T ps >hello.ps
see hello.pdf
Old fonts
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 /opt/local/share/groff/1.24.1/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/opt/local/share/groff/1.24.1/oldfont ...
or add the directory to groff's font and device description search path
environment variable,
$ GROFF_FONT_PATH=/opt/local/share/groff/1.24.1/oldfont \
groff -Tps ...
when the command runs.
Exit status
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.
Environment
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.
Files
/opt/local/share/groff/1.24.1/font/devps/DESC
describes the ps output device.
/opt/local/share/groff/1.24.1/font/devps/F
describes the font known as F on device ps.
/opt/local/share/groff/1.24.1/font/devps/download
lists fonts available for embedding within the PostScript
document (or download to the device).
/opt/local/share/groff/1.24.1/font/devps/prologue
is the default PostScript prologue prefixed to every output
file.
/opt/local/share/groff/1.24.1/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.
/opt/local/share/groff/1.24.1/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.
/opt/local/share/groff/1.24.1/tmac/pspic.tmac
defines the PSPIC macro for embedding images in a document; see
groff_tmac(5). It is automatically loaded by troffrc.
/opt/local/share/groff/1.24.1/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 (dh) and thorn (th) that older
PostScript printers do not natively support.
/opt/local/share/doc/groff-1.24.1/examples/install-font.bash
This script, contributed by mom macro package author Peter
Schaffter and long available at his web site, assists with
making TrueType (.ttf), OpenType (.otf), and PostScript Type 1
(.pfa, .pfb) fonts available to groff.
Change to its directory and run "bash install-font.bash -H" for
a man page-like description of its features and operation.
grops creates temporary files using the template "gropsXXXXXX"; see
groff(1).
See also
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)
groff 1.24.1 2026-05-15 grops(1)
groff 1.24.1 - Generated Mon May 18 12:59:49 CDT 2026