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)