GROFF_FONT(5) File Formats Manual GROFF_FONT(5)
groff_font - format of groff device and font description files
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.
Empty lines are ignored.
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 are 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 causes 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. Alternatively, 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 point sizes. 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 are associated with styles S1, ...,
Sm.
tcommand
This means that the postprocessor can handle the t and u
output commands.
unicode
Indicate that the output device supports the complete Unicode
repertoire. 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).
This is used for -Tutf8, -Thtml, and -Txhtml.
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 glyph
widths. Needed for the grohtml device.
use_charnames_in_special
This command indicates that troff should encode named glyphs
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; empty lines are ignored in both of
them.
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]
Glyphs 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 glyphs 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 glyph is requested
that is not present in the current font, it is 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
glyph. 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 glyph: if name is a single glyph 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 special
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 glyph is unnamed; such
glyphs can only be used by means of the \N escape sequence in troff.
The type field gives the glyph type:
1 means the glyph has a descender, for example, ‘p’;
2 means the glyph has an ascender, for example, ‘b’;
3 means the glyph has both an ascender and a descender, for
example, ‘(’.
The code field gives the code which the postprocessor uses to print
the glyph. The glyph can also be input to groff using this code by
means of the \N escape sequence. The code can be any integer. If it
starts with a 0 it is interpreted as octal; if it starts with 0x or
0X it is interpreted as hexadecimal. Note, however, that the \N
escape sequence only accepts a decimal integer.
The entity_name field gives an ASCII string identifying the glyph
which the postprocessor uses to print that glyph. This field is
optional and is currently used by grops to build sub-encoding arrays
for PS fonts containing more than 256 glyphs. (It has also been used
for grohtml's entity names but for efficiency reasons this data is
now compiled directly into grohtml.)
Anything on the line after the encoding field or ‘--’ are 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 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 lowest point
below the baseline to which the glyph extends (downwards is
positive); if a glyph 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 glyph when it is immediately to be followed by a
glyph from a roman font. The left-italic-correction subfield gives
the amount of space that should be added before the glyph when it is
immediately to be preceded by a glyph from a roman font. 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.
A line in the charset section can also have the format
name "
This indicates that name is just another name for the glyph 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 glyph c1 appears next to glyph c2 the space
between them should be increased by n. Most entries in kernpairs
section have a negative value for n.
/usr/local/share/groff/1.22.3/font/devname/DESC
Device description file for device name.
/usr/local/share/groff/1.22.3/font/devname/F
Font file for font F of device name.
groff_out(5), troff(1), addftinfo(1), afmtodit(1)
A man-page name(n) of section n can be viewed either with
$ man n name
for text mode or
$ groffer nname"
for graphical mode (default is PDF mode).
Copyright © 1989-2014 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This file is part of groff (GNU roff), which is a free software
project.
You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU
General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation,
either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later
version.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program. If not, see GPL2
⟨http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html⟩.
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 tarball groff-1.22.3.tar.gz fetched from
⟨ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/groff/⟩ on 2017-07-05. 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
man-pages@man7.org
Groff Version 1.22.3 4 November 2014 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), groff_out(5), groff_tmac(5), lj4_font(5), groff(7)