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.