UNROFF manual page
Table of Contents
unroff - convert troff documents to plain text
unroff [ -E ] [ -J ] [ -8 ] [ -mxx
] [ file ... ]
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 generally 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.
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).
troffcvt(1), tc2text(1)
Paul DuBois, dubois@primate.wisc.edu.
unroff doesn't do so well with tables, particularly tables
with multiple-line cells. Table centering isn't handled.