UTP is one of the best books on Unix from a user's perspective.
– Jack Redman

Originally published in 1987, Unix Text Processing (UTP) (written by Dale Dougherty and Tim O'Reilly) provides one of the few comprehensive looks at all the tools involved in a typical troff-based writing workflow. It covers:

• UNIX and troff basics
• text editors (vi, ex, and sed)
• the ms and mm macro packages
• scripting with sh, awk, and sed
• the tbl, eqn and pic preprocessors
• macro writing

The appendices provide a collection of reference material and other useful pointers.

UTP was originally published by Hayden Books (which was acquired by Howard W. Sams before the book was actually published). In the early 21^st^ century, the authors made the book available at the Open Books Project under the Creative Commons Attribution License. Scanned pages are available in PBM (Portable BitMap) and PDF formats. The original troff markup is lost.

In 2002, some members of the GNU Troff (groff) mailing list began transcribing the book and recreating the source code. It took a little over a year of manic activity, punctuated by long naps, and we released "UTP Revival" in 2004. We still hope to modernize the book ("UTP Revisited"). Whether you want to use GNU Troff, or Plan 9 or one of its derivatives (Heirloom Troff and Neatroff), UTP is still an excellent guide to the nuts and bolts of print publishing.

The current (main) branch is UTP 1.1, which provides a clickable index, TOC, and cross-references within the PDF (thanks to Deri James). You will need groff 1.22 or newer to format it, as it uses the -Tpdf driver. If you have an older groff, switch to the 1.0 branch.

The UTP Revival Release is distributed according to the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. A copy of the license is available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0.

Note: The transcription project predated Plan 9 and its derivatives. Thus, the recreated source and macros were written for groff, and we made no attempt to be compatible with the original troff. Patches for Heirloom or Neatroff (if needed) are welcome!

• First, a big thanks to the original authors for making the book available in the first place. Nothing else could have happened without that first step.
• Jon Snader provided the scripts to build the table of contents.
• Michael Hobgood and Andreas Kähäri handled proofreading chores.
• Deri James added PDF links for the contents and index.

Individuals who worked on various chapters: