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NAME

       unroff - convert troff documents to plain text

SYNTAX

       unroff [ -E ] [ -J ] [ -8 ] [ -mxx ] [ file ...  ]

DESCRIPTION

       unroff  processes  documents  written  to  be  formatted with troff (or
       nroff, or any of the other *roff variants) and converts them  to  plain
       text.  This is similar to what deroff does, but the result is sometimes
       better than deroff output.

       Optional flags may be given to  modify  the  operation  of  unroff,  as
       follows:

       -E     Echo   input  tokens  as  they  are  read.   Useful  mainly  for
              debugging.

       -J     Join output lines that would be part of a  single  paragraph  so
              they  form  a single output line.  This is useful if you plan to
              move the resulting output into a document formatter that  treats
              paragraphs as a single line.  The default is to do line wrapping
              according to the line length specified in the input document.

       -8     Write 8-bit ISO Latin-1 (ISO 8859-1)  characters.   This  option
              may  be  useful  for  producing  output intended to be viewed on
              devices  capable  of  8-bit  character  display.   Without  this
              option,  8-bit  Latin-1  characters  will generall appear in the
              output as ‘‘[[name]]’’ where ‘‘name’’ is the  troffcvt  internal
              name for the character, e.g., ‘‘[[Aacute]]’’.  For some of these
              characters, an ASCII approximation will  be  used  if  something
              reasonably close is available.

       -mxx   Specify macro package, usually -man, -me, -mm, or -ms.

DIAGNOSTICS

       line  length  clipped  to  nnn  chars.   A  very  long  line length was
       requested, so long that it would likely result in output line  assembly
       buffer overflow.  The length is clipped to prevent this.

       output  buffer capacity exceeded.  This means some line is so long that
       it couldn’t be collected in the  output  line  assembly  buffer.   Most
       likely  this  signals a bug in tc2text, since the length is supposed to
       be kept within reasonable bounds (see previous paragraph).

SEE ALSO

       troffcvt(1), tc2text(1)

WHO-TO-BLAME

       Paul DuBois, dubois@primate.wisc.edu.

BUGS

       unroff doesn’t  do  so  well  with  tables,  particularly  tables  with
       multiple-line cells.  Table centering isn’t handled.

                                                                     UNROFF(1)