This package contains the traditional UN*X text formatting tools troff, nroff, tbl, eqn, and pic. These utilities, together with the man-db package, are essential for displaying the on-line manual pages.

groff-base is a stripped-down package containing the necessary components to read manual pages in ASCII, Latin-1, and UTF-8, plus the PostScript device (groff's default). Users who want a full groff installation, with the standard set of devices, fonts, macros, and documentation, should install the groff package.