Hi, and welcome to the world of groff! Tackling your second issue first:
On Wed, Mar 12, 2025 at 10:32 PM dvalin--- via GNU roff typesetting system discussion <groff@gnu.org> wrote: > OK, let's skip the macro library, and rely only on basic troff stuff. > > That should help me get the hang of things at a simpler level, anyhow. That's a solid approach. However, your input file isn't quite compatible with it. The ".I" macro is defined in the -ms package, so when you omit that package, ".I" becomes an unrecognized macro, which groff ignores. (If you turn on all warnings, such as with groff's -ww flag, it does warn about this. It's a useful flag for beginners to use habitually.) This is why everything on that line was omitted from your PostScript output. To get italics in basic troff, try this: This is .ft I italic stuff .ft I hope. Nonetheless, you'll almost certainly want to use a macro package for anything beyond trivial input, so let's look into what's going wrong with that. > $ groff -ms /tmp/sample.groff > /tmp/sample.ps > > troff: fatal error: can't find macro file s This suggests something installed incorrectly on your system. What type of system are you on? Does it have a /usr/share/groff/current/tmac directory? This is a common location where tmac files are installed, including s.tmac, the file that SHOULD be loaded with the "-ms" flag.
