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A technical blogger writing under the name Groff says he has completed two unpublished works he describes as novellas: one about 15,000 words and another about 40,000. In a post dated Oct. 31, 2026, he explains how he typeset them with groff and says the longer draft took 10 days; neither work is being offered for publication or private sharing.
A technical blogger writing under the name Groff says he has completed two unpublished novella-length stories, using the Linux typesetting system groff to turn them into PDFs. In a post published Oct. 31, 2026, he said the works run to about 15,000 and 40,000 words and made clear he does not intend to publish or privately distribute them.
The writer describes the first work as roughly 50 A5 pages and the second as about 120 pages. He says the first took more than seven months to write, while the longer second story took 10 days. He characterizes both as only borderline examples of a novella: the shorter may be too brief and the longer slightly too long, depending on the definition.
The post focuses on the technical process rather than the stories’ plots, which the author does not disclose. He says he typeset both works with groff, a text-formatting system commonly associated with producing Unix and Linux manual pages. For the books, he created a small custom macro package to handle chapter headings, paragraph formatting and spacing, then generated PDFs in A5 page size.
He reports that rendering the 50-page document took about 700 milliseconds on his 13.5-year-old computer, while the 120-page document took about 1.6 seconds. Those timings include preprocessing, according to the post. He presents the speed as a practical advantage of a compact tool, while acknowledging that his knowledge of groff’s more complex typesetting features remains incomplete.
A Private Writing Project, Publicly Documented
The development is less a book launch than an account of an unexpected creative project. The writer says he will not publish either story and will not send them privately, so readers cannot assess the fiction itself. What is available is a detailed explanation of how he moved from writing prose to producing book-like layouts with a longstanding technical tool.
For readers interested in independent writing and publishing workflows, the post offers a concrete example of using groff outside its familiar manual-page role. Its custom formatting setup is intentionally modest: the author says these stories needed flowing text and occasional emphasis, not the tables, diagrams, cross-references or other features that a larger publishing project might require. The account also distinguishes writing speed from total project duration: the 10-day figure applies to the longer story’s drafting, while the first took more than seven months.
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From Reading Fiction to Writing It
The author says he began reading novels that had been sitting in his apartment around July 2025. Fiction had previously been a slow and often unappealing activity for him, he writes; he estimates that before this change he read at most about one book a year. Since July 2025, he says, he has read roughly 30 novels, with reading times ranging from a few days to three months.
That experience led him to try writing fiction himself. He describes the shift as surprising because writing at school had felt unpleasant, except when assignments involved technical subjects such as mathematics or physics. The Oct. 31 post brings those interests together: it recounts the creative work, then turns to the software, formatting choices and workflow used to prepare the documents. The post’s title, “Novellas with Groff,” refers to both the author’s writing and the typesetting tool; it does not announce a public release.
“I won’t publish this. Nor will I send it to you privately.”
— The author, in the Oct. 31, 2026 post
The Stories Remain Private
The post does not identify the stories’ plots, characters or intended audiences, and the author says the manuscripts will not be shared. It is therefore not possible to independently evaluate their content or confirm their classification as novellas; the author himself says the two works sit near the boundaries of that label.
The reported page counts and word counts are the writer’s own descriptions, not figures accompanied by published manuscripts or independent checks. The post excerpt also begins a technical discussion of page footers and page numbering but does not provide enough of the full explanation here to establish every formatting detail. No publication plans, release schedule or follow-up project are stated.
No Release Is Planned
The author has not announced a next milestone for either story. His stated position is that the works will remain unpublished and privately undistributed. The post instead documents the tools and process he used, including groff, A5 PDF output and a small custom macro package.
Any further development—such as another story, a revised typesetting setup or a change in plans to share the manuscripts—has not been announced. For now, the Oct. 31 post is the public account of the project, while the fiction itself remains unavailable.
Key Questions
What happened in the “Novellas with Groff” post?
A technical blogger described completing two unpublished stories and explained how he used groff to format them as A5 PDFs. The post was published on Oct. 31, 2026.
How long are the two stories?
The writer estimates the first at about 15,000 words and 50 A5 pages, and the second at about 40,000 words and 120 pages. These figures come from his post.
Will readers be able to get copies?
Not according to the author. He says he will not publish the stories or send them privately.
What is groff, and how did he use it?
Groff is a text-formatting and typesetting system often used to produce manual pages on Unix-like systems. The writer used it with a small custom macro package to format chapter headings, paragraphs and spacing, then create PDFs.
How long did writing the stories take?
The author says the first took more than seven months. He says the longer second story took 10 days; the post does not say that this figure includes editing or later revisions.
Source: movq.de
