Some early examples of computer markup languages available outside the publishing industry can be found in typesetting tools on Unix systems such as troff and nroff.

Unlike many other text formatters, troff can position characters arbitrarily on a page, even overlapping them, and has a fully programmable input language.

Inputs to troff are plain text files that can be created by any text editor.

In modern usage, DTP is not generally said to include tools such as TeX or troff, though both can easily be used on a modern desktop system and are standard with many Unix-like operating systems and readily available for other systems.

MakeIndex can process raw data output by various programs, however, it is generally used with LaTeX and troff.

Early minicomputer-based typesetting software introduced in the 1970s and early 1980s, such as Datalogics Pager, Penta, Atex, Miles 33, Xyvision, troff from Bell Labs, and IBM's Script product with CRT terminals, were better able to drive these electromechanical devices, and used text markup languages to describe type and other page formatting information.

* troff and nroff, for typesetting and formatting Unix manpages.

A typical distribution of troff includes the me macros for formatting research papers, man macros for creating Unix man pages, mv macros for creating mountable transparencies, and the ms and mm macros for letters, books, technical memoranda, and reports.

In 2010, OpenBSD deprecated troff for formatting manpages in favour of mandoc, a specialised compiler / formatter for manpages with native support for output in PostScript, HTML, XHTML, and the terminal.

With troff came nroff ( they were actually almost the same program ), which was for producing output for line printers and character terminals.

These programs transform certain parts of a document into troff input, fitting naturally into the use of " pipelines " in Unix — sending the output of one program as the input to another ( see pipes and filters ).

During the mid-1970s, Joseph Ossanna, working at Bell Laboratories, wrote the troff typesetting program to drive a Wang C / A / T phototypesetter owned by the Labs ; it was later enhanced by Brian Kernighan to support output to different equipment, such as laser printers and the like.

It was a descendant of the RUNOFF program from CTSS, the first computerized text-formatting program, and is a predecessor of the Unix troff document processing system.

roff was the first Unix text-formatting computer program, the most important application run on the first machine specifically purchased to run UNIX, and a predecessor of the nroff and troff document processing systems.

Like the main troff program, tbl uses command lines interspersed with data to be printed.

Also, this new version of troff ( often called ditroff for device independent troff ) had several extensions, which included drawing functions.

The troff collection of tools ( including pre-and post-processors ) was eventually called Documenter's WorkBench ( DWB ), and was under continuous development in Bell Labs and later at the spin-off Unix System Laboratories ( USL ) through 1994.

The troff typesetting system includes sets of commands called macros that are run before starting to process the document.

Unfortunately, Ossanna's troff was written in PDP-11 assembly language and produced output specifically for the CAT phototypesetter.

* unroff is an extensible replacement of troff written in Scheme

The troff macros used for man pages (- mm ) were the general-purpose ones written by Ted Dolotta ( later to be the first manager of USG and the principal author of the System III manual ), with additions for the manuals.

So it was that in 1973 he authored the first version of troff for Unix entirely written in PDP-11 assembly language.

troff is the major component of a document processing system developed by AT & T for the Unix operating system.

The program's documentation defines the output format of ditroff, which is used by many modern troff clones like GNU groff.

While troff has been supplanted by other programs such as Interleaf, FrameMaker and LaTeX, it is still the default format of the UNIX documentation.

Three preprocessors provide troff with drawing capabilities by defining a domain-specific language for describing the picture.

Documentation for Gemini was done in troff with a project proprietary set of macros by the name of Scribe ( IIRC ).

An independent compatible implementation of the eqn preprocessor has been developed by GNU as part of groff, the GNU version of troff.

Examples are typesetting instructions such as those found in troff and LaTeX, or structural markers such as XML tags.

Well-known examples include troff, LaTeX, and PostScript.

Markup languages like XML, HTML or troff, which define structured data, are not generally considered programming languages.

It was dubbed troff, for typesetter ' roff.

It understood everything troff did, and ignored the commands which were not applicable ( e. g. font changes ).

So, Brian Kernighan took on the task of rewriting troff.

At that time, SoftQuad took over the maintenance, although Brian Kernighan continued to improve troff on his own.

Use of troff and family was reduced somewhat in the 1990s, but it is still being used quite extensively.

In addition, due to the open sourcing of Ancient UNIX Systems, as well as modern successors such as OpenSolaris and Plan 9 from Bell Labs, several versions of AT & T troff are available under various open source licenses.

troff features commands to designate fonts, spacing, paragraphs, margins, footnotes and more.

* The pic typesetting language for troff

* The eqn typesetting language for troff, along with Lorinda Cherry

* groff is GNU Project's free replacement for troff and nroff.

* User manual for the Plan 9 edition of troff

These are not full replacements for the nroff / troff suite of tools, but are sufficient for display and printing of basic documents and manual pages.