Part of the troff suite of Unix document layout tools, eqn is a preprocessor that formats equations for printing. A similar program, neqn, accepted the same input as eqn, but produced output tuned to look better in nroff. eqn was created in 1974 by Brian Kernighan and Lorinda Cherry. Troff is a document processing system developed by AT&T for the Unix operating system. ... Filiation of Unix and Unix-like systems Unix (officially trademarked as UNIXâ¢) is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. ... In computer science, a preprocessor is a program that processes its input data to produce output that is used as input to another program. ... The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. ... Brian Wilson Kernighan (pronounced Ker-ni-han; the g is silent; born 1942) is a computer scientist who worked at the Bell Labs and contributed to the design of the pioneering AWK and AMPL programming languages. ...
The input language used by eqn allows the user to write mathematical expressions in much the same way as they would be spoken aloud. The eqn language is similar to the mathematical component of TeX, which appeared several years later, but is simpler and less complete. For example, here's how some of the examples from [1] would be written in eqn (and formatted by TeX): TeX (IPA: as in Greek, often in English; sometimes written TEX in imitation of the logo) is a typesetting system created by Donald Knuth. ...
The output of GNU eqn cannot be processed with Unixtroff; it must be processed with GNU troff.
GNU eqn does not provide the functionality of neqn: it does not support low-resolution, typewriter-like devices (although it may work adequately for very simple input).
eqn will normally set equa- tions at whatever the current point size is when the equation is encountered.