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 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.

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.educ .

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