Editing Troff (section)

== Other front-ends ==
Several other front-ends have been developed that are intended to be friendlier interfaces to troff.  

One of them is '''Sanscribe''', originally developed at Berkeley and then enhanced during the 1980s by several users including [[Intel]] and  [[Advanced_Computer_Techniques#InterACT|InterACT]].  Used for writing memos, reports, documents, Sanscribe is built upon basic troff commands as well as the me macros and various pre- and post-processors such as soelim, eqn, tbl, grap, and pic. However it is a main program binary, not a preprocessor.  The conditional inclusion capability renders it especially useful for maintaining multi-platform reference manuals. However, Sanscribe is fragile and prone to giving  cryptic errors or producing weirdly formatted results.<ref name="sanscribe">{{cite book | title=Sanscribe: User's Guide and Reference | publisher=... | edition=Revision 3.0 | date=January 13, 1989 | pages=1-1, 2-1, 3-2, 6-1 }}</ref>

A special-purpose front-end is '''vgrind''', which generates nicely formatted source program listings, with such features as putting comments in italics, keywords in bold, and function names highlighted in margins. It can run either as a filter or as a main program with its output being passed to troff. It has support for the languages in use at Bell Labs facilities, including not just [[Fortran]], [[C programming language|C]], and [[C++ programming language|C++]] but also domain-specific tools such as [[Bourne shell]] and [[yacc]] as well as those further afield such as [[Emacs Lisp]] and [[Icon (programming language)|Icon]].<ref name="oreilly-quick-svr4">{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=hjSqwEKIyOAC&pg=PA187 | title=UNIX in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference for System V Release 4 and Solaris 7 | first=Arnold | last=Robbins | publisher=O'Reilly Media | edition=Third | location=Sebastopol, California | year=1999 | pages=151, 187–189 | isbn=978-1-56592-427-7 }}</ref>

A different approach is employed by the '''CADiZ''' suite of tools for the [[Z notation]].  Rather than the <code>cadiz</code> program being a preprocessor in the front of the pipeline, it interacts multiple times with <code>troff</code> as both input and output, using saved files rather than a pipe. CADiZ also contains its own set of macros, called <code>.ZA</code> through <code>.ZZ</code>.<ref name="cadiz">{{cite conference | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=nSHUBwAAQBAJ&dq=cadiz+soelim+eqn+tbl+pic&pg=PA95 | first1=David | last1=Jordan | first2=John A. | last2=McDermid | first3=Ian | last3=Toyn | year=1991 | title=CADi<math>\mathbb{Z}</math> &ndash; Computer Aided Design in Z | conference=Z User Workshop, Oxford 1990: Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Z User Meeting, Oxford: 17&ndash;18 December 1990 | editor-first=J. E. | editor-last=Nicholls| publisher=Springer-Verlag | location=Berlin, Heidelberg | pages= 93–104 }}</ref>