Developer writes novellas in groff, won't share them
A programmer shares technical deep-dive on typesetting two unpublished novellas using the Unix tool groff.
What to know
- A technically-minded developer who disliked writing in school has written two novellas (15k and 40k words) using groff, a Unix typesetting tool.
- The author typeset both works in groff using custom macros, praising the tool's speed—rendering takes 700ms and 1.6 seconds respectively on old hardware.
- The novellas will not be published or shared privately, remaining private writing projects.
- The developer's interest in fiction reading rekindled last year after decades of indifference, jumping from ~1 book/year to 30 books since July 2025.
dverlaeckt80 Developer and novelist
How it unfolded 1 development · click the chart to see its coverage articlesposts
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Blog post gains attention on Hacker News and Lobsters
The groff article reaches 53 points on Hacker News with 16 comments and 29 points on Lobsters with 4 comments, sparking technical discussion.
“Don't even think about it: I won't publish this. Nor send it to you privately, which is mostly the same as publishing it.”
— dverlaeckt80 · source -
1 outlet Novellas with Groff
first by HN Frontpage, 10d ago
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I think it’s fascinating to see all the different ways that techfolk who write fiction set up their writing pipelines. Some people go with a bare-bones coding editor like Vim; others use “pro” tools Scrivener. And then there’s the typesetting pipeline. Using troff is pretty out there.When I started writing fiction, here’s what I came up with. I…
2 more of the top 3 · 15 posts in this stretch
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Novellas with Groff L: https:// movq.de/blog/postings/2026-10- 31/0/POSTING-en.html C: https:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5 0325694 posted on 2026.11.01 at 08:51:41 (c=0, p=5)
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One potential weakness with using groff for professional publishing is that, according to its current mission statement (2014), its line-layout algorithm is limited and well behind the times:Groff currently uses a greedy algorithm to format paragraphs one line at a time, but the Knuth-Plass algorithm, implemented in TeX, Heirloom troff and…
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background
Developer publishes technical writeup on typesetting novellas with groff — A detailed blog post explains the software choices and custom macro package used to typeset both novellas in groff, emphasizing the tool's speed and simplicity for novel production.
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Developer completes second novella in ten days — A longer 120-page (~40k word) novella is written in ten days, contrasting sharply with the first novella's seven-month timeline.
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Developer begins reading fiction novels after decades without interest — After reading books sitting in their apartment for years, they discover they enjoy fiction. They read approximately 30 novels between July 2025 and October 2026.
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Developer starts writing first novella — The author begins composing a 50-page (~15k word) novella over the course of more than seven months.
What people are saying 12 voices from 1 site · best of 15 · verbatim
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Fwiw I wrote a bunch of my college papers on a version of Roff originally written by Col. G. L. Sicherman for CP/M, which I ported to Turbo C for the obsolete-when-I-got-it MSDOS laptop that I had back then. I ran that program under x64 Linux much more recently and it still worked after I ripped out some DOS stuff, despite some C anachronisms. The…
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The macro packages were a royal pain in the neck. As soon as you mastered one, somebody submitted a paper to a mill which demanded another. I alternated -ms and -me for ages because of this.When we had a continuous paper wet process xerography printer, the cut-marks were a godsend. Once we stopped having that printer, they were a major…
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Huh. I wrote into vim and made a bunch of .md files, and then just had Claude assemble them into an epub to make my book for Kindle. How did you decide on that size of page for the PDF?
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troff is no longer fashionable, and it's not what you want for top-quality typesetting, but I don't think of it as "out there". My non-technical mother was using an HDOS program called TEXT.ABS, which is similar to a limited nroff, to format the articles she wrote in the 01980s. It wasn't as easy to use as something like MacWrite, but it was a lot…
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For those that don't know, groff's ancestor "roff" is very closely tied to UNIX's origin story. roff itself had it's own antecedent called RUNOFF (whence the name) on Multics. roff was basically UNIX's first "killer app" and was used to typeset patent applications by the division of Bell Labs that handled that sort of thing. It legitimized the…
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I was glad to see this page about groff, which is much underrated as a publishing system. The perl script for replacing some markdown markup with chosen groff macros is very interesting. I was however wondering about why the OA chose to write their own macro set rather than simply using the mom macros? Was it simply the need for German markup (and…
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I think 9front (Plan 9 fork) dev, cartoonist and fiction writer Stanley Lieber also formats a good part of his stuff with troff, e.g: https://massivefictions.com/2024/06/24/0/"This book was typeset (troff -ms|lp -dstdout|ps2pdf) in URW Garamond No. 8 by the author, using an MNT Reform laptop running the 9front operating system."
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O'Reilly used to typeset their books using troff/groff: http://www.lemis.com/grog/Documentation/PUS/tmac.Gbignuts.G (“O'Reilly & Associates book macros by Steve Talbott, Lenny Muellner”)
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> techfolk who write fiction set up their writing pipelinesAnd perhaps infinitely procrastinating on the actual writing itself...
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Game of Thrones author George RR Martin writes all his novels on an old MS-DOS machine, not connected to the internet, and he uses WordStar 4.0. [1][1]
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Agreed, it seems writers that also code have all kinds of different workflows. I end up using (x)html and doing print stylesheets and rendering pdf for print using weasyprint (works really well, and they have sample stylesheets on their website that are a good starting point).I like Erewhon. Nice font.
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I typeset some university work in troff in 1994. The professor I submitted it to was impressed but questioned my sanity in front of half of the class. Not wrong to do so.Might still have the source code to that work somewhere. And it probably still parses.Can't remember why I did it but on reflection it might simply have been that LaTeX was not…