ADC Home > Reference Library > Reference > Mac OS X > Mac OS X Man Pages

 

This document is a Mac OS X manual page. Manual pages are a command-line technology for providing documentation. You can view these manual pages locally using the man(1) command. These manual pages come from many different sources, and thus, have a variety of writing styles.

For more information about the manual page format, see the manual page for manpages(5).



GROFF_FONT(5)                                                                                  GROFF_FONT(5)



NAME
       groff_font - format of groff device and font description files

DESCRIPTION
       The  groff  font  format is roughly a superset of the ditroff font format.  The font files for device
       name are stored in a directory devname.  There are two types  of  file:  a  device  description  file
       called  DESC and for each font F a font file called F.  These are text files; unlike the ditroff font
       format, there is no associated binary format.

   DESC file format
       The DESC file can contain the following types of line as shown below.   Later  entries  in  the  file
       override previous values.

       charset
              This  line  and  everything  following in the file are ignored.  It is allowed for the sake of
              backwards compatibility.

       family fam
              The default font family is fam.

       fonts n F1 F2 F3...Fn
              Fonts F1...Fn will be mounted in the font positions m+1,...,m+n  where  m  is  the  number  of
              styles.  This command may extend over more than one line.  A font name of 0 will cause no font
              to be mounted on the corresponding font position.

       hor n  The horizontal resolution is n machine units.

       image_generator string
              Needed for grohtml only.  It specifies the program to  generate  PNG  images  from  PostScript
              input.   Under  GNU/Linux this is usually gs but under other systems (notably cygwin) it might
              be set to another name.

       paperlength n
              The physical vertical dimension of the output medium in machine units.   This  isn't  used  by
              troff itself but by output devices.  Deprecated.  Use papersize instead.

       papersize string
              Select  a  paper  size.   Valid values for string are the ISO paper types A0-A7, B0-B7, C0-C7,
              D0-D7, DL, and the US paper types letter, legal, tabloid, ledger, statement, executive, com10,
              and monarch.  Case is not significant for string if it holds predefined paper types.  Alterna-tively, Alternatively,
              tively, string can be a file name (e.g. `/etc/papersize'); if the file can  be  opened,  groff
              reads  the  first  line  and tests for the above paper sizes.  Finally, string can be a custom
              paper size in the format length,width (no spaces before and after the comma).  Both length and
              width must have a unit appended; valid values are `i' for inches, `c' for centimeters, `p' for
              points, and `P' for picas.  Example: 12c,235p.  An argument  which  starts  with  a  digit  is
              always  treated  as  a  custom  paper format.  papersize sets both the vertical and horizontal
              dimension of the output medium.

              More than one argument can be specified; groff scans from left to right  and  uses  the  first
              valid paper specification.

       paperwidth n
              The  physical  horizontal  dimension  of the output medium in machine units.  Deprecated.  Use
              papersize instead.  This isn't used by troff itself but by output devices.

       pass_filenames
              Make troff tell the driver the source file name being processed.  This is achieved by  another
              tcommand: F filename.

       postpro program
              Use program as the postprocessor.

       prepro program
              Call program as a preprocessor.

       print program
              Use  program  as the spooler program for printing.  If omitted, the -l and -L options of groff
              are ignored.

       res n  There are n machine units per inch.

       sizes s1 s2...sn 0
              This means that the device has fonts at s1, s2,...sn scaled points.  The list of sizes must be
              terminated  by  a 0.  Each si can also be a range of sizes m-n.  The list can extend over more
              than one line.

       sizescale n
              The scale factor for pointsizes.  By default this has a value of 1.  One scaled point is equal
              to one point/n.  The arguments to the unitwidth and sizes commands are given in scaled points.

       styles S1 S2...Sm
              The first m font positions will be associated with styles S1...Sm.

       tcommand
              This means that the postprocessor can handle the t and u output commands.

       unitwidth n
              Quantities in the font files are given in machine units for fonts whose point size is n scaled
              points.

       unscaled_charwidths
              Make the font handling module always return unscaled character widths.  Needed for the grohtml
              device.

       use_charnames_in_special
              This command indicates that troff should encode named characters inside special commands.

       vert n The vertical resolution is n machine units.

       The res, unitwidth, fonts, and sizes lines are compulsory.  Not all commands in  the  DESC  file  are
       used  by  troff  itself; some of the keywords (or even additional ones) are used by postprocessors to
       store arbitrary information about the device.

       Here a list of obsolete keywords which are  recognized  by  groff  but  completely  ignored:  spare1,
       spare2, biggestfont.

   Font file format
       A font file has two sections.  The first section is a sequence of lines each containing a sequence of
       blank delimited words; the first word in the line is a key, and subsequent words  give  a  value  for
       that key.

       ligatures lig1 lig2...lign [0]
              Characters  lig1,  lig2, ..., lign  are  ligatures; possible ligatures are ff, fi, fl, ffi and
              ffl.  For backwards compatibility, the list of ligatures may be terminated with a 0.  The list
              of ligatures may not extend over more than one line.

       name F The name of the font is F.

       slant n
              The characters of the font have a slant of n degrees.  (Positive means forward.)

       spacewidth n
              The normal width of a space is n.

       special
              The  font is special; this means that when a character is requested that is not present in the
              current font, it will be searched for in any special fonts that are mounted.

       Other commands are ignored by troff but may be used by postprocessors to store arbitrary  information
       about the font in the font file.

       The  first  section  can contain comments which start with the # character and extend to the end of a
       line.

       The second section contains one or two subsections.  It must contain a charset subsection and it  may
       also  contain  a  kernpairs  subsection.  These subsections can appear in any order.  Each subsection
       starts with a word on a line by itself.

       The word charset starts the charset subsection.  The charset line is followed by a sequence of lines.
       Each  line  gives  information  for  one character.  A line comprises a number of fields separated by
       blanks or tabs.  The format is

              name metrics type code [entity_name] [-- comment]

       name identifies the character: if name is a single character c then it corresponds to the groff input
       character  c;  if it is of the form \c where c is a single character, then it corresponds to the spe-cial special
       cial character \[c]; otherwise it corresponds to the groff input character \[name].  If it is exactly
       two  characters  xx  it  can be entered as \(xx.  Note that single-letter special characters can't be
       accessed as \c; the only exception is `\-' which is identical to `\[-]'.  The name --- is special and
       indicates  that  the character is unnamed; such characters can only be used by means of the \N escape
       sequence in troff.

       Groff supports eight-bit characters; however some utilities have difficulties with eight-bit  charac-ters. characters.
       ters.  For this reason, there is a convention that the name charn is equivalent to the single charac-ter character
       ter whose code is n.  For example, char163 would be equivalent to the character with code  163  which
       is the pounds sterling sign in ISO Latin-1.

       The type field gives the character type:

       1      means the character has a descender, for example, p;

       2      means the character has an ascender, for example, b;

       3      means the character has both an ascender and a descender, for example, (.

       The code field gives the code which the postprocessor uses to print the character.  The character can
       also be input to groff using this code by means of the \N escape sequence.  The code can be any inte-ger. integer.
       ger.   If  it  starts with a 0 it will be interpreted as octal; if it starts with 0x or 0X it will be
       intepreted as hexadecimal.  Note, however, that the \N escape sequence only accepts a  decimal  inte-ger. integer.
       ger.

       The  entity_name  field  gives  an ascii string identifying the glyph which the postprocessor uses to
       print the character.  This field is optional and has been introduced so that the html  device  driver
       can  encode  its  character  set.   For example, the character `\[Po]' is represented as `£' in
       html 4.0.

       Anything on the line after the encoding field resp. after `--' will be ignored.

       The metrics field has the form (in one line; it is broken here for the sake of readability):

              width[,height[,depth[,italic-correction
              [,left-italic-correction[,subscript-correction]]]]]

       There must not be any spaces between these subfields.  Missing subfields are assumed to  be  0.   The
       subfields are all decimal integers.  Since there is no associated binary format, these values are not
       required to fit into a variable of type char as they are in ditroff.  The width subfields  gives  the
       width of the character.  The height subfield gives the height of the character (upwards is positive);
       if a character does not extend above the baseline, it should be given a zero height,  rather  than  a
       negative  height.   The  depth subfield gives the depth of the character, that is, the distance below
       the lowest point below the baseline to which the character extends  (downwards  is  positive);  if  a
       character  does  not  extend below above the baseline, it should be given a zero depth, rather than a
       negative depth.  The italic-correction subfield gives the amount of space that should be added  after
       the  character  when  it  is  immediately to be followed by a character from a roman font.  The left-italic-correction leftitalic-correction
       italic-correction subfield gives the amount of space that should be added before the  character  when
       it  is  immediately  to be preceded by a character from a roman font.  The subscript-correction gives
       the amount of space that should be added after a character before adding a subscript.  This should be
       less than the italic correction.

       A line in the charset section can also have the format

              name "

       This indicates that name is just another name for the character mentioned in the preceding line.

       The word kernpairs starts the kernpairs section.  This contains a sequence of lines of the form:

              c1 c2 n

       This  means  that  when  character  c1  appears next to character c2 the space between them should be
       increased by n.  Most entries in kernpairs section will have a negative value for n.

FILES
       /usr/share/groff/1.19.2/font/devname/DESC   Device description file for device name.

       /usr/share/groff/1.19.2/font/devname/F      Font file for font F of device name.

SEE ALSO
       groff_out(5), troff(1).



Groff Version 1.19.2                           8 October 2004                                  GROFF_FONT(5)

Did this document help you?
Yes: Tell us what works for you.
It’s good, but: Report typos, inaccuracies, and so forth.
It wasn’t helpful: Tell us what would have helped.