groffstudio: An IDE for the GNU troff typesetting system.

[Tuxman]

This has been out in the wild for a few weeks, and I plan to maintain it for a few more months at least , so I won't wait for NANY 2023 to announce it here:



groffstudio is the least bad (and only) IDE for GNU troff, a free implementation of the standard POSIX typesetting system (see Wikipedia et al.).


Website (which is very beautiful as well)


While one could debate whether Linux, BSD and UNIX users would even need this (they usually use make or Mk for that), using groff on Windows is not quite as trivial: First you'll need to find and install groff with all required dependencies, then you'll need to learn how to use it on the command line without having access to the manual, because man does not exist on Windows. groffstudio has a button to download groff right from my servers - just unpack it somewhere in your %PATH% and you're good to go. (It will check whether it's there.)

Features:

• Has a large button to generate .ps or .pdf files.
• Can help you install groff on Windows.
• Has built-in update checks (optional, off by default).
• Open Source, licensed under the terms of the CDDL-1.1 license.
  (That still does not invalidate my copyright.)
• Written in Free Pascal, using the LCL widget set, to make portability easier.
  Precompiled binaries for Windows and macOS exist, contributions are welcome.

Non-features:

• Support for other troff implementations, like neatroff and Heirloom troff.
  Maintaining a GUI for one troff which has a relatively reliable set of installed features is hard enough.
• A preview mode, as known from LaTeX editors like TeXstudio.
  Previewing requires compilation. Just compile. 
• A formatting toolbar.
  As groff has a standard set of formatting commands, but all of its macro packages (and some preprocessors) come with their own set of additional commands, that would be either not helpful or awkward.

Enjoy or whatever.

[Ath]

All of your design skills in one place

No kidding, I like it for it's plain vanilla interface.

[Tuxman]

Good! 

[Tuxman]

Changelog for the upcoming 0.13.0 release, to be uploaded some time between "in four hours" and "in twelve hours":

[Feature] Support for hdtbl.
[Changed] Build extras and build preprocessors are now listed in a multi-select box.
[Improved] If no error has occurred, the log file will contain a success message.
[Improved] The default font looked gross on macOS. This should be better now.
[Bugfix] Calling troff over the system default shell now, potentially finding more paths.
[Improved] BuildDocument uses a simpler execution approach now.
[Feature] macOS Cmd+X/C/V are supported now.
[Feature] Added a loading window so you won't think groffstudio would procrastinate.

[Tuxman]

0.13.1 is there. Replaced the new loading window by a threaded process.

[wysardry]

I'm having a few minor problems with using groffstudio on Windows 10.

The link to groff was greyed out, but I downloaded groff-1.22.4-w32-bin from here. I copied the files to C:\programs\groff\ and added C:\programs\groff\bin\ to my path.

I am able to load man page files in groffstudio, but it can only convert them to PostScript, not PDF format. The pdfroff file is in programs\groff\bin so it should be found by the system.

If a PDF file does get created, it is around 2Kb in size (regardless of the input file size) and appears blank in Firefox.