troff

• Analogously to the .ft and \f pair, two new requests ‘gcolor’ and ‘fcolor’ (which pair with \m and \M, respectively) have been added to set the glyph and background colours.

• A new read-only, string-valued register ‘.sty’ returns the name of the current style.

• Two new conditional operators ‘F ⟨ name⟩ ’ and ‘S ⟨ name⟩ ’ have been added. ‘F’ is true if a font ⟨ name⟩ exists. ‘S’ is true if a style ⟨ name⟩ has been registered.

• Cyrillic characters have been added to the ‘utf8’ and ‘html’ output devices.

pic

• The ‘by’ argument in a ‘for’ loop can now be negative if it is additive. For the multiplicative case, it must be greater than zero.

eqn

• The following keywords aren’t new but haven’t been documented previously:

  undef NAME (to undefine a macro)
  copy "FILE" (a synonym for ‘include’)
  space n (to modify the vertical spacing before and after an equation)

• The following macros aren’t new but haven’t been documented previously:

  Alpha, ..., Omega (the same as ‘ALPHA’, ..., ‘OMEGA’)
  ldots (three dots on the base line)
  dollar (a dollar glyph)

• The following keywords have been extended. Again, this isn’t new but hasn’t been documented previously:

  col n { ... }
  lcol n { ... }
  rcol n { ... }
  ccol n { ... }
  pile n { ... }
  lpile n { ... }
  rpile n { ... }
  cpile n { ... } (set vertical spacing between rows to N)

grohtml

• This device driver has been raised to beta stage; its set of tags should be stable now.

• New command-line option ‘−s’ to set the base point size.

• New command-line option ‘−S’ to set the split level while generating multiple files.

grotty

• Experimental support for zero-width and double-width characters.

gxditview

• On platforms which have the X Window System this program is now built and installed automatically.

xtotroff

• This program to create font definition files for xditview isn’t new but hasn’t been installed previously.

groffer

• A security problem (reported as CAN-2004-0969) has been fixed.

gdiffmk

• A new script contributed by Mike Bianchi. It compares two groff, nroff, or troff documents and creates an output with added margin characters (using ‘.mc’) to indicate the differences.

pdfroff

• A new wrapper script contributed by Keith Marshall to easily create PDF documents with groff.

macro packages

• ms.tmac

  • Support for fractional point sizes: A value for the ‘PS’, ‘VS’, ‘FPS’, and ‘VPS’ register larger than or equal to 1000 is always divided by 1000. For example, ‘.nr PS 10250’ sets the document’s font size to 10.25 points.

  • The ‘Ds’ and ‘De’ macros provided in ms since groff version 1.19 have been removed; the equivalent ‘DS’ and ‘DE’ macros should be used instead. X11 documents which actually use ‘Ds’ and ‘De’ always load a specific macro file from the X11 distribution (‘macros.t’) which provides proper definitions for the two macros.

  • The following registers have been added for improving layout control:

    PORPHANS

    Defines number of lines following ‘LP’, ‘PP’, ‘QP’, ‘IP’ or ‘XP’ which must be kept together, before any automatic page break.

    HORPHANS

    Sets number of lines of following paragraph which must be kept with a heading, defined by ‘NH’ or ‘SH’, before any automatic page break.

    GROWPS

    Sets the first level of heading (set with ‘NH’) which keeps the same point size as body text.

    PSINCR

    Sets the point size increment for each level of heading (set with ‘NH’), below the threshold level set by ‘GROWPS’; e.g., if \n[PS] = 10, \n[GROWPS] = 3 and \n[PSINCR] = 2.0p, then ‘.NH 1’ produces 14pt headings, ‘.NH 2’ produces 12pt, and all other levels remain at 10pt (because \n[PS] = 10).

  • The ‘SH’ macro now accepts a numeric argument, to make heading size match that of ‘NH’ with same argument value when the ‘GROWPS’/‘PSINCR’ feature is enabled.

  Please refer to the documentation of the ms package for other, minor improvements.

• me.tmac

  The section type set with the ‘++’ request is available in the ‘_M’ register. This isn’t new but hasn’t been documented before.

• www.tmac

  The ‘HR’ macro no longer causes an empty line for non-HTML devices.

  A new macro ‘HEAD’ has been added to directly add data to the <head>...</head> block.

  New macros ‘OLS’ and ‘OLE’ to start and end an ordered list.

  New macros ‘DLS’ and ‘DLE’ to start and end a definition list.

pdfmark

• A new macro package contributed by Keith Marshall which implements PDF marks. This is in alpha stage currently.

miscellaneous

• Two new keywords to the DESC file have been added which are needed for grohtml: ‘image_generator’ and ‘unscaled_charwidths’. The former gives the name of the program which creates PNG images, and the latter makes troff always use unscaled character widths.