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5.1 Text
========

AT&T 'troff' was designed to take input as it would be composed on a
typewriter, including the teletypewriters used as early computer
terminals, and relieve the user drafting a document of concern with
details like line length, hyphenation breaking, and the achievement of
straight margins.  Early in its development, the program gained the
ability to prepare output for a phototypesetter; a document could then
be prepared for output to either a teletypewriter, a phototypesetter, or
both.  GNU 'troff' continues this tradition of permitting an author to
compose a single master version of a document which can then be rendered
for a variety of output formats or devices.

   'roff' input files contain text interspersed with instructions to
control the formatter.  Even in the absence of such instructions, GNU
'troff' still processes its input in several ways, by filling,
hyphenating, breaking, and adjusting it, and supplementing it with
inter-sentence space.

* Menu:

* Filling::
* Hyphenation::
* Sentences::
* Breaking::
* Adjustment::
* Tabs and Leaders::
* Requests and Macros::
* Macro Packages::
* Input Encodings::
* Input Conventions::