Groff is the GNU replacement for the Troff and nroff text formatters. It is an original implementation written in C plus plus by James Clark (XML expert) and is modeled after ditroff, including many extensions. The first version, 0.3.1, was released June 1990. The first stable version, 1.04, was announced in November 1991.

Groff contains a large number of helper programs, preprocessors, and postprocessors including eqn, tbl, pic and soelim.

Groff development of new features continues, and is an important part of free Unix-like operating systems such as Linux and FreeBSD - notably because troff macros are used to create man pages, a type of documentation used for core parts of these operating systems.

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