FF(1)

NAME
ff - fast text formatter

USAGE
ff [options] [-] [files]

DESCRIPTION
ff is a simple text formatter for flexible uniform formatting of input files. Program options are used to control formatting. This is in contrast to text formatters like nroff (1) that require special format requests to be part of their input files. Besides avoiding cryptic format requests in text, ff is considerably faster than traditional formatters like nroff (1) and even simple formatters like fmt (1).

The most complicated concept with ff is that of a line break. A line break causes an interruption in the filling (evening out of the text lines). Line breaks occur when special characters are seen at the beginnings of lines, or when all lines are broken. By default, any non-alphanumeric character will cause a break, but this can be controlled with the -B option. A blank line always causes a break.

OPTIONS
There are many, many options to allow control of indentation, line width, line spacing, filling, pagination with headers and footers, line numbering, right justification, and perhaps some other things. They have extensive type and range checking that produces diagnostic error messages, so warnings of obviously wrong options will not be discussed here. In general, options that imply the use of others work the way they should; if the page size is set, then pagination is automatically assumed. Some combinations of options give impressive, even artistic, effects. Making a small text file and playing with it is the easiest way to learn how the options interact. [b] Break all lines of text. That is, don't even-out lines by filling. By default, text lines are filled. [B breakchars] Change the set of characters that cause line breaks at the start of lines to breakchars. By default, any characters but letters and numbers cause a break. A good choice for break characters might be "*-+" and TABS that might be used for lists. [c] Center all lines of text. This option stops all filling of text. [d] Delete white space at the beginning and end of lines. This option is useful to help un-format text to be re-formatted. [D] Delete empty input lines. An input line is empty if it has no characters, not even invisible character like tabs or spaces. This option can be combined with the option to remove white space to delete visibly blank lines. [f footer] Set the page footer to the title-string footer. The default page footer is blank. Titles can be any string, but if the first character is not a letter or a digit, but a punctuation character like /, then that character separates the left, center, and right fields of a title. For example, the title
"/ff: fast formatter/#/1985/" would have "ff: fast formatter" as a left justified field and 1985 as a right justified field on each page. The page number, within the input file, would be centered in the title. There are two special characters, # and *, that respectively are variables for the page number in a file and the input file name. The global page number, which is not reset for each file, is ##.
There is a whole language that allows you to insert information about the file being printed. You can see online help for this language by running the command:
    echo | ff -f %? It is a complicated language, but you can avoid it by avoiding the percent (%) character in titles. [F footersize] Set the number of blank lines at the bottom of the page. The footer, if any, is placed in the middle of the space, which by default, is five lines. If footersize is 0, no footer will be printed. [h header] Set the page header. See the description of three-part titles for the -f footer option. The default page header is
"|File: *||Page: #|". [H headersize] See the description of the footer size. [i indent] Set the indentation of the text to indent spaces. Note that this effectively reduces the usable width of the page. [I tempindent] Set the temporary indent. This causes filled text found immediately after a break to be indented for one line. It is useful for indenting the first lines of paragraphs. If tempindent is negative, the the temporary indent will be relative to the current indent value. If the tempindent value is more negative than the indent value is positive, ff will automatically increase indent. [j] Justify the text. That is, even the right margin by inserting spaces in the line. Only filled text can be justified. [n] Number all output lines produced by the input text. Lines from multiple line spacing or pagination will not be numbered. [N numberwidth] Set the width of the line numbers. The default is to take up 4 spaces. Note that this effectively reduces the usable part of the page. [O] Print a summary of all the options and stop. [p] Paginate the output. See the options for page header and footer control. [P pagesize] Set the number of lines in a page to pagesize. By default, the standard 66 line page is assumed. [s spacing] Set the line spacing. By default, text is single spaced (spacing equals 1). [t tab] Set individual absolute and relative tab stops. These values tell the formatter where to put the text (from an unfilled line) that follows a tab character. Each tab stop is supplied with its own -t option; there is no way to bundle them. tab values can be integers without a plus sign. These are absolute tab settings; the tabs go to that position. The values must increase monotonically. If a tab value is preceded by a plus sign, then it is interpreted relative to the previous tab setting. For example, a tab setting of 40 followed by one of +20 will set the second tab stop to 60. [T tabs] Set tab stops to every tabs spaces. It is useful to get equally spaced tabs. This option cannot be used with the other tab setting option. [u] Print All Input Text As Initial Upper-Case Titles, Like This Sentence. This option goes well with the one for centering lines. [w width] Set the page width. By default, the page width is 72 characters. Note that the usable line length is sometimes less than the page width. If line numbering or indentation is requested, these subtract from the line length.

EXAMPLES
Some of these examples can make shell scripts or aliases.

Centered Titles: title
	ff  -dcu  $*
Double Spaced Unfilled Paginated indented (for editing): draft
	ff  -s 2  -b  -p  -f "`date`"  -i 8  $*
Program Listing: cpr
	H="@        Dir: `pwd`@@File: *@"
	F="@        $NAME@`date`@Page #@"
	ff  -b  -N 8  -H 3  -h "$H"  -F 3  -f "$F"  -T 4  -w 79  -i 2  $*
Reformat Paragraphed Text: nr
	ff  -jd  -I 5  -i 10  -w 65  -B "TAB SP'*.@"  $*

DIAGNOSTICS
Some options are incompatible with others. For example, centered text cannot be right-justified. ff will not allow inconsistent combinations of options.

SEE ALSO
fmt(1), nroff(1), scribe(1w)

AUTHOR
Gary Perlman (with help from many students)

STATUS
Pretty well tested.