Copyright 1997-2022 Free Software Foundation, Inc. Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification, are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright notice and this notice are preserved. This file contains information that supplements the generic installation instructions in file 'INSTALL'. Building and Installing from within the Source Tree =================================================== A simple method of building and installing groff is as follows. 1. 'cd' to the directory containing groff's source code and type './configure' to configure groff for your system. If you are using 'csh' on an old version of AT&T Unix System V, you might need to type 'sh ./configure' instead to prevent 'csh' from trying to execute 'configure' itself. While 'configure' runs, it reports properties of the host system that determine how the build is to be performed. 2. Type 'make' to compile groff. You may wish to add the '-j' option to accelerate the build on multicore systems. 3. Optionally, check the build for sound operation as described under "Evaluation" below. 4. Type 'sudo make install' to install groff's programs, data files, and documentation. 'make install' is the only step for which you need 'root' access; 'sudo' obtains this access. 5. You can remove the groff executables and other generated files from the source code directory by typing 'make clean'. To also remove the files that 'configure' created (so you can compile groff for a different kind of computer or with different options to 'configure'), type 'make distclean'. Building and Installing from outside the Source Tree ==================================================== It is also possible to perform the build and installation procedure outside the source code directory. In this case an external build directory structure is created without changing any parts of the source tree. This practice is useful if the source code is read-only or if several different installations, such as for multiple architectures, should be constructed. As an example, we will imagine that groff's source code is in '/usr/local/src/groff' and that the build should happen within the directory '/home/my/groff-build'. You can choose your own name for the build directory. 0. Create '/home/my/groff-build' and 'cd' to that directory. 1. Type '/usr/local/src/groff/configure' to configure groff for your system. If you are using 'csh' on an old version of AT&T System V Unix, you might need to type 'sh /usr/local/src/groff/configure' instead. 2. Type 'make' to compile groff. You may wish to add the '-j' option to accelerate the build on multicore systems. 3. Optionally, check the build for sound operation as described under "Evaluation" below. 4. Type 'sudo make install' to install groff's programs, data files, and documentation. 'make install' is the only step for which you need 'root' access; 'sudo' obtains this access. 5. You can remove the groff executables and other generated files from the source code directory by typing 'make clean'. To also remove the files that 'configure' created (so you can compile groff for a different kind of computer or with different options to 'configure'), type 'make distclean'. Unprivileged Installation ========================= The use of 'sudo' is only necessary if one or more destination directories used by the 'make install' command are in locations that require administrative access for writing. You can 'configure' groff with options like '--prefix' that select an alternative directory that is writable by the user conducting the build. Type './configure --help' from the groff source tree for documentation of relevant options. Running groff commands from such a directory may require you to set the 'GROFF_FONT_PATH' and 'GROFF_TMAC_PATH' environment variables. See the groff(1) man page. See "Evaluation" below for instructions on viewing this man page without having groff installed. Non-POSIX Platforms =================== For instructions how to build groff with DJGPP tools for MS-DOS and MS-Windows, see the file arch/djgpp/README. For instructions how to build groff with the MinGW tools for MS-Windows, see the file README.MinGW. Dependencies ============ groff is predominantly written in ISO C++98, so you need a C++ compiler capable of handling this standardized version of the language. The C++ source files use a suffix of '.cpp'; your C++ compiler must be able to handle this. A C/C++ preprocessor that conforms to ISO C90 is also required. If you don't already have a C++ compiler, we suggest GCC 9.4 or later. To override the configure script's choice of C++ compiler, you can set the CXX environment variable to the name of its executable. A few components of groff are written in ISO C99. Features later made optional by ISO C11 (the 'complex' primitive data type and variable-length arrays) are not used. Several programs distributed with GNU roff are written in the Perl language. Version 5.6.1 (1 April 2001) or later is required. The 'uchardet' library is an optional dependency of the 'preconv' program: if this library is found by 'configure', it will be automatically used by 'preconv'. Discovery of the 'uchardet' library requires the 'pkg-config' program to be installed on your system, as well as the library's C header files--on a package-based host system, this can mean installing uchardet's '-dev' or '-devel' package. The configure script searches for fonts originating with the URW foundry; these are metrically-compatible replacements for the Adobe PostScript Level 2 base 35 fonts required by that standard. These URW fonts are packaged with Ghostscript and in various derivative versions. The Adobe fonts are not free software, but the replacements, named "Nimbus Roman", "Nimbus Sans", and "Nimbus Mono", and so forth, are. The PostScript standard and early versions of the PDF standard assumed that these base fonts will be supplied by the rendering device (a printer or PDF viewer). Nowadays the PDF standard expects all fonts to be embedded in the document; if groff's gropdf(1) output driver knows where to find these fonts, you can use its "-e" option for this purpose. The configure script populates a "Foundry" file that tells gropdf where they reside after searching in several common locations. If you have multiple versions of the URW fonts available on your system, or the configure script cannot locate them on its own, use its "--with-urw-fonts-dir" option to tell the script where to find them. If you never use groff to generate PostScript or PDF documents, you can ignore any output from the configure script about URW fonts. Miscellaneous ============= If you want A4 or U.S. letter paper format and the configure script produces an incorrect guess, say PAGE=xxx ./configure where 'xxx' should be either 'A4' or 'letter'. This affects only the media size used by some groff output drivers, like grops (which can still be overridden on the command line). For compatibility with AT&T troff, GNU troff's default page length is always 11 inches. The page length can be changed with the 'pl' request. Evaluation ========== Once groff is built, you can check it for correct operation without having to install it. groff comes with a test suite; use 'make check' to run it. You can also try it out from the directory you used to build it. A script called 'test-groff' is supplied for this purpose. It sets up environment variables to allow groff to run without being installed. For example, the command ./test-groff -man -Tascii src/roff/groff/groff.1 | less -R displays the groff(1) man page with the 'less' pager. (You might prefer either the '-Tlatin1' or '-Tutf8' option to '-Tascii' depending on the character set you're using.) Documentation ============= The groff Texinfo manual can be viewed in several formats. Versions corresponding to the source document 'doc/groff.texi' are supplied with the source distribution archive. You can browse it in GNU info format. info doc/groff.info It can be viewed as text encoded in ISO Latin-1 as well. iconv -f latin1 -t utf8 doc/groff.txt | less # for UTF-8 users less doc/groff.txt # for Latin-1 users Renderings in HTML, TeX DVI, and PDF are also available. lynx doc/groff.html xdvi doc/groff.dvi evince doc/groff.pdf A compilation of groff's man pages is available in text (with ISO 6429 escape sequences) and PDF. less -R doc/groff-man-pages.utf8.txt evince doc/groff-man-pages.pdf In Case of Trouble ================== If a test fails, gather its log file from the build directory. For instance, the test "tmac/tests/localization-works.sh" (in the source directory) will have a log file called "tmac/tests/localization-works.sh.log" in the build directory. To re-run a test, change to the top of the build directory (if necessary) and run the test by name from the shell prompt. For example, to rerun the test mentioned above from a "build" directory I created as a subdirectory in the source tree, I would do this. (cd build && ../tmac/tests/localization-works.sh) I can view the test log as follows. cat build/tmac/tests/localization-works.sh.log Many known issues are documented in the PROBLEMS file; some apply to historical systems. You can also browse groff bug reports via the GNU Savannah issue tracker to see if your issue has already been reported. https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=groff If that doesn't help and you need support, please contact the groff mailing list at groff@gnu.org. If you think that you have found a bug, please submit a ticket. https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=groff&func=additem Uninstalling ============ If you are dissatisfied with groff, or to prepare for a new installation from source, you can uninstall it to ensure that no stale files persist on the system. Run the command 'make uninstall'. (If you used 'sudo make install', run 'sudo make uninstall'.) At a minimum, some directories not particular to groff, like 'bin' and (depending on configuration) an X11 'app-defaults' directory will remain, as will one plain file called 'dir', created by GNU Texinfo's 'install-info' command. (As of this writing, 'install-info' offers no provision for removing an effectively empty 'dir' file, and groff does not attempt to parse this file to determine whether it can be safely removed.) All other groff artifacts will be deleted from the installation hierarchy. ##### Editor settings Local Variables: fill-column: 72 mode: text End: vim: set autoindent textwidth=72: