:nroff:: /N'rof/ [UNIX, from "new roff" (see {{troff}})] n. A
companion program to the UNIX typesetter {{troff}}, accepting
identical input but preparing output for terminals and line
printers.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
off /T'rof/ or /trof/ n.
[Unix] The gray
eminence of Unix text processing a formatting and phototypesetting
program, written originally in PDP-11 assembler and then in
barely-structured early C by the late Joseph Ossanna, modeled after
the earlier ROFF which was in turn modeled after the Multics and
CTSS program RUNOFF by Jerome Saltzer (that name came from
the expression "to run off a copy")....
filter: [orig. {{UNIX}}, now also in {{MS-DOS}}] n. A program that
processes an input data stream into an output data stream in some
well-defined way, and does no I/O to anywhere else except possibly
on error conditio...