xtotroff(1)

💖 xtotroff — NAME 💖

okay bestie, so xtotroff is literally the glow-up artist that takes X font metrics and turns them into groff font metrics. it's giving translator, but make it fonts ✨

---

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

xtotroff [-d destination-directory] [-r resolution] [-s type-size] font-map

xtotroff --help

xtotroff -v

xtotroff --version

---

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so here's the tea: xtotroff takes your font-map and uses it to create groff(1) font description files out of X11 fonts. iconic behavior fr fr.

every single line in font-map pairs a groff font name with an X font name, and that X font name is written as an X Logical Font Description (XLFD) pattern. the two members of the pair get separated by spaces and/or tabs — no cap. for example, if your input font-map file is just this one line:

TB -adobe-times-bold-r-normal--*-*-*-*-p-*-iso8859-1

then it maps the XLFD on the right to the groff font name TB, which is conventionally called “Times bold”. periodt 💅

xtotroff opens a connection to the running X server to go query its font catalog, and if it can't do that, it aborts. 💀 if necessary, the wildcards in the XLFD patterns get populated with the arguments you passed to -r and -s. and if a font name is still ambiguous after all that? yeah, xtotroff aborts again. no vibes.

for each successful mapping, xtotroff creates a groff font description file named after each groff font, and drops it in the current working directory (or wherever -d tells it to go), then reports the mapping to the standard output stream. we love a queen who narrates her work 🫶

---

✨ OPTIONS ✨

• --help — shows you a usage message. meanwhile -v and --version spill the version info. all of them exit right afterward, so they're like a lil one-and-done moment.
• -d destination-directory — write the font descriptions to destination-directory instead of the current working directory. basically "not here, bestie, put it over there."
• -r resolution — sets the resolution for all font patterns in font-map. the value gets used for both the horizontal and vertical motion quanta. if you don't specify it, a resolution of 75dpi is assumed. she's got a default and she's sticking to it.
• -s type-size — sets the type size in points for all font patterns in font-map. if you don't specify it, a size of 10 points is assumed.

---

👑 EXIT STATUS 👑

• status 0 — successful operation, we ate and left no crumbs ✨
• status 2 — the program cannot interpret its command-line arguments
• status 1 — it encountered an error during operation 😭

---

🎀 FILES 🎀

• /usr/share/groff/1.24.2/font/FontMap-X11 — this is the font mapping file used to produce the pre-generated font description files, supplied with groff, of X11 core fonts corresponding to the 13 base Type 1 fonts for PostScript level 1. she's the blueprint, the main character reference sheet 💜

---

💀 BUGS 💀

the only supported font encodings are “iso8859-1” and “adobe-fontspecific”. that's it. that's the whole list. don't come at her with anything else 🙈

---

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

• “X Logical Font Description Conventions”, by Jim Flowers and Stephen Gildea.
• X(7), groff(1), gxditview(1), troff(1), groff_font(5)

---

groff 1.24.2 — 2026-10-04 — yeah bestie this whole thing is from the groff 1.24.2 era, dated 2026-10-04, and that's the sign-off, mwah 💋 go convert some fonts, you got this 🧚‍♀️