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groff_font(5) File Formats Manual groff_font(5)
groff_font - GNU roff device and font description files
The groff font and output device description formats are slight extensions of those used by AT&T device-independent troff. In distinction to the AT&T implementation, groff lacks a binary format; all files are text files. (Plan 9 troff has also abandoned the binary format.) The device and font description files for a device name are stored in a directory called devname. The device description file is called DESC, and, for each font f supported by the device, a font file called “f”, where f is usually an abbreviation of a font's name and/or style. For example, the ps (PostScript) device has groff font description files for Times roman (TR) and Zapf Chancery Medium italic (ZCMI), among many others, while the utf8 device (for terminal emulators) has only font descriptions for the roman, italic, bold, and bold-italic styles (R, I, B, and BI, respectively).DESC
The DESC file can contain the following types of line as shown below. Except for the charset directive, which must come last (if at all), the order of the lines is not important. Later entries in the file, however, override previous values. Empty lines are ignored. charset This line and everything following it in the file are ignored. It is recognized for compatibility with other troff implementations. In GNU troff, character set repertoire is described on a per-font basis. family fam The default font family is fam. fonts n F1 ... Fn Fonts F1, ..., Fn are mounted in the font positions m+1, ..., m+n where m is the number of styles (see below). This directive may extend over more than one line. A font name of of 0 causes no font to be mounted at the corresponding position. hor n The horizontal resolution is n basic units. All horizontal quantities are rounded to multiples of this value. image_generator program Use program to generate PNG images from PostScript input. Under GNU/Linux, this is usually gs(1), but under other systems (notably Cygwin) it might be set to another name. The grohtml(1) driver uses this directive. paperlength n The vertical dimension of the physical output medium is n basic units. Deprecated: use papersize instead. papersize format-or-dimension-pair-or-file-name Set the dimensions of the physical output medium according to the argument, which is either a standard paper format, a pair of dimensions, or the name of a plain text file containing either of the foregoing. Recognized paper formats are the ISO and DIN formats A0–A7, B0–B7, C0–C7, and D0–D7; the U.S. formats letter, legal, tabloid, ledger, statement, and executive; and the envelope formats com10, monarch, and DL. Case is not significant for the argument if it holds predefined paper types. Alternatively, the argument can be a custom paper size in the format length,width (with no spaces before or after the comma). Both length and width must have a unit appended; valid units are “i” for inches, “c” for centimeters, “p” for points, and “P” for picas. Example: “12c,235p”. An argument that starts with a digit is always treated as a custom paper format. Finally, the argument can be a file name (e.g., /etc/papersize); if the file can be opened, troff reads the first line and attempts to match the above forms. No comment syntax is supported. More than one argument can be specified; troff scans from left to right and uses the first valid paper specification. paperwidth n The horizontal dimension of the physical output medium is n basic units. Deprecated: use papersize instead. pass_filenames Direct troff to emit the name of the source file being processed. This is achieved with the intermediate output command “x F”. The grohtml driver uses this directive. postpro program Use program as the postprocessor. prepro program Use program as a preprocessor. Currently, this keyword is used only when troff is directed to use the html or xhtml output devices. print program Use program as the spooler program for printing. If omitted, the -l and -L options of groff are ignored. res n The device has n basic units per inch. sizes s1 ... sn 0 The device has fonts at s1, ..., sn scaled points (see below). 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 Set the scale factor for point sizes to one divided by n. The default is 1. styles S1 ... Sm The first m font positions are associated with styles S1, ..., Sm. tcommand The postprocessor can handle the t and u intermediate output commands. unicode The output device supports the complete Unicode repertoire. This directive is useful only for devices which produce character entities instead of glyphs. If unicode is present, no charset section is required in the font description files since the Unicode handling built into groff is used. However, if there are entries in a charset section, they either override the default mappings for those particular characters or add new mappings (normally for composite characters). The utf8, html, and xhtml output devices use this directive. unitwidth n Quantities in the font files are given in basic units for fonts whose point size is n scaled points. unscaled_charwidths Make the font handling module always return unscaled glyph widths. The grohtml driver uses this directive. use_charnames_in_special This directive indicates that troff should encode named glyphs inside special commands. The grohtml driver uses this directive. vert n The vertical resolution is n basic units. troff recognizes but ignores the directives spare1, spare2, and biggestfont. The res, unitwidth, fonts, and sizes lines are mandatory. Directives not listed above are ignored by troff but may be used by postprocessors to store arbitrary information about a device in the DESC file.
On typesetting output devices, each font is typically available at multiple sizes. While paper size measurements in the device description file are in absolute units, measurements applicable to fonts must be proportional to the type size. groff achieves this using the precedent set by AT&T device-independent troff: one size of a font is chosen as a norm, and all other sizes are scaled linearly relative to that basis. The “unit width” is the number of basic units per point. For instance, groff's lbp device uses a unitwidth of 800. In its Times roman font (“TR”), its spacewidth is 833; this is also the width of its comma, period, centered period, and mathematical asterisk, while its “M” is 2963 basic units. Thus, an “M” on the lbp device is 2,963 basic units wide at a notional type size of 800 points. (800-point type is not practical for most purposes, but using it enables the quantities in the font description files to be expressed as integers.) A font description file has two sections; empty lines are ignored in both. The first section is a sequence of lines each containing a sequence of space-delimited words; the first word in the line is a key, and subsequent words associate a value with that key. name F The name of the font is F. spacewidth n The width of a normal, unadjusted space is n basic units at a type size of unit-width points. The above directives are mandatory; the remaining ones in the first section are optional. slant n The glyphs of the font have a slant of n degrees, where a positive n slants in the direction of text flow. ligatures lig1 ... lign [0] Glyphs lig1, ..., lign are ligatures; possible ligatures are ff, fi, fl, ffi, and ffl. For compatibility with other troff implementations, the list of ligatures may be terminated with a 0. The list of ligatures must not extend over more than one line. special The font is special; this means that when a glyph is requested that is not present in the current font, it is searched for in any special fonts that are mounted. Other directives are ignored by troff but may be used by postprocessors to store arbitrary information about the font in the 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 either order. Each subsection starts with a directive on a line by itself. The directive charset starts the charset subsection. (This keyword is a misnomer since it starts an ordered list of glyphs, not characters.) The charset line is followed by a sequence of lines, each with information about one glyph. A line comprises a number of fields separated by spaces or tabs. The format is as follows. name metrics type code [entity_name] [-- comment] name identifies the glyph: if name is a single character c, it corresponds to the troff input character c. Otherwise, it must be of the form \name where name is at least one character; it then corresponds to the groff special character escape sequence \[name], or the one-sixth and one-twelfth unbreakable space escape sequences, \| and \^ (“thin” and “hair” spaces, respectively). A name consisting of three minus signs, “---”, indicates that the glyph is unnamed: such glyphs can only be accessed by means of the \N escape sequence in troff. A special character named “---” can still be defined using .char and similar requests. The form of the metrics field is as follows (on one line; it may be 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 the C language data type char as they are in AT&T device-independent troff. The width subfield gives the width of the glyph. The height subfield gives the height of the glyph (upwards is positive); if a glyph 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 glyph, that is, the distance below the baseline to which the glyph extends (downwards is positive); if a glyph does not extend below the baseline, it should be given a zero depth, rather than a negative depth. Italic corrections are relevant to glyphs in italic or oblique styles. The italic-correction subfield gives the amount of space that should be added after the glyph when it is to be followed immediately by a glyph from an upright style. The left-italic-correction subfield gives the amount of space that should be added before the glyph when it is to be preceded immediately by a glyph from an upright style. The subscript-correction gives the amount of space that should be added after a glyph before adding a subscript. This should be less than the italic correction. The type field gives a featural description of the glyph. 1 means the glyph has a descender (for example, “p”); 2 means the glyph has an ascender (for example, “b”); and 3 means the glyph has both an ascender and a descender (for example, this is true of parentheses in some fonts). The code field gives a numeric identifier that the postprocessor uses to render the glyph. The glyph can be specified to troff using this code by means of the \N escape sequence. The code can be any integer (that is, any integer parsable by the C standard library's strtol(3) function). The entity_name field defines an identifier for the glyph that the postprocessor uses to print the troff glyph name. This field is optional; it was introduced so that the grohtml output driver could encode its character set. For example, the glyph \[Po] is represented by “£” in HTML 4.0. For efficiency, these data are now compiled directly into grohtml. grops uses the field to build sub-encoding arrays for PostScript fonts containing more than 256 glyphs. Anything on the line after the encoding field or “--” is ignored. A line in the charset section can also have the following format. name " This notation indicates that name is another name for the glyph mentioned in the preceding line. Such aliases can be chained. The word kernpairs starts the kernpairs section. It contains a sequence of lines formatted as follows. c1 c2 n The foregoing means that when glyph c1 is typeset immediately before c2, the space between them should be increased by n. Most kerning pairs should have a negative value for n.
/usr/local/share/groff/1.23.0/font/devname/DESC describes the output device name. /usr/local/share/groff/1.23.0/font/devname/F describes the font known to troff as F on device name.
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”. “Troff User's Manual” by Joseph F. Ossanna, 1976 (revised by Brian W. Kernighan, 1992), AT&T Bell Laboratories Computing Science Techical Report No. 54, widely called simply “CSTR #54”, documents the language, device and font description file formats, and device-independent output format referred to collectively in groff documentation as “AT&T troff”. “A Typesetter-independent TROFF” by Brian W. Kernighan, 1982, AT&T Bell Laboratories Computing Science Techical Report No. 97, provides additional insights into the device and font description file formats and device-independent output format. Section “See also” of groff(1) lists utilities available for preparing font files in a variety of formats for use with groff output drivers. groff_out(5), troff(1), addftinfo(1)
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groff 1.23.0.rc1.1101-d1263-di2r0tyAugust 2021 groff_font(5)
Pages that refer to this page: addftinfo(1), afmtodit(1), eqn(1), grodvi(1), groff(1), grohtml(1), grolbp(1), grolj4(1), gropdf(1), grops(1), grotty(1), hpftodit(1), tfmtodit(1), troff(1), groff_out(5), lj4_font(5), groff(7), groff_char(7), groff_diff(7)