This package contains optional components of the GNU troff text-formatting system. The core package, groff-base, contains the traditional tools like troff, nroff, tbl, eqn, and pic. This package contains additional devices and drivers for output to DVI, HTML (when recommended packages are installed - see below), PDF, HP LaserJet printers, and Canon CAPSL LBP-4 and LBP-8 printers.

The X75, X75-12, X100, and X100-12 devices, which allow groff output to be conveniently viewed on an X display using the standard X11 fonts, are now included here. They were previously in a separate package, groff-x11.

Besides these, the groff package contains man pages describing the language and its macro sets, info documentation, and a number of supplementary programs:

- gxditview, which is used to display the output of the X* devices, and can also be used to view PostScript output from groff; - grn, a preprocessor for pictures in the 'gremlin' format; - tfmtodit, which creates font files for use with 'groff -Tdvi'; - hpftodit, which creates font files for use with 'groff -Tlj4'; - afmtodit, which creates font files for use with 'groff -Tps'; - refer, which preprocesses bibliographic references for use with groff; - indxbib, which creates inverted indices for bibliographic databases used by 'refer'; - lkbib and lookbib, which search bibliographic databases; - addftinfo, which adds metric information to troff font files for use with groff; - pfbtops, which translates a PostScript font in .pfb format to ASCII for use with groff; - mmroff, a simple groff preprocessor which expands references in mm; - pic2graph, which converts PIC diagrams into cropped image files; - eqn2graph, which converts EQN equations into cropped image files; - pdfmom, which runs 'groff -mom' to produce PDFs.

All the standard macro packages are supported.

Some facilities only work if certain recommended packages are installed:

- ghostscript, netpbm, psutils: required for HTML output; - imagemagick: required for the pic2graph and eqn2graph programs; - libpaper1: paper size detection in dvi, lbp, lj4, and ps devices (falls back to a4 if not installed); - perl: required for PDF output and for the chem preprocessor.