unroff(1) [linux man page]
UNROFF(1) General Commands Manual UNROFF(1) 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 accord- ing 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 buf- fer 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)
Check Out this Related Man Page
TBLCVT(1) General Commands Manual TBLCVT(1) NAME
tblcvt - troffcvt preprocessor to convert tbl-format tables SYNTAX
tblcvt [ file ] ... DESCRIPTION
tblcvt examines troff input for tables that would normally be processed by the tbl program, i.e., for lines bracketed by the .TS table start and .TE table end requests. tblcvt parses table specifications and data and converts it to a form that troffcvt can more easily han- dle. This is useful for document processing commands that use troffcvt, since troffcvt has knowledge only of the troff input language, and knows nothing of the tbl input language. tblcvt is a direct replacement for tbl. Suppose you would normally process a document using tbl and troff (or groff, etc.) like this: % tbl file ... | troff ... To format the document using tblcvt and troffcvt, use a command like this: % tblcvt file ... | troffcvt ... Actually, it's more likely that you'll be using one of the troffcvt front ends such as troff2html than that you'll be using troffcvt directly. troffcvt in the preceding command may be replaced by the name of the front end: % tblcvt file ... | troff2html ... If it seems that troffcvt or a front end are not reading the output from tblcvt , specify - after the option list to explicitly tell them to read the standard input after processing their other options: % tblcvt file ... | troffcvt ... - % tblcvt file ... | troff2html ... - DIAGNOSTICS
Diagnostic messages are written in this format: tblcvt:line l (table t, section s): message... This indicates that a problem was detected at line number l, and that tblcvt considers the line to be part of table number t and section s within the table. Section numbers start at one and are incremented for each .T& request that occurs within a table specification. SEE ALSO
troffcvt(1) tblcvt - A troffcvt Preprocessor WHO-TO-BLAME Paul DuBois, dubois@primate.wisc.edu. BUGS
For the most part, tblcvt assumes your tables make sense, i.e., are legal according to the tbl input language. tblcvt may complain about malformed table constructs (if it detects them), but it may also get confused by them and generate garbage output. tblcvt generates troff output that uses long request names, so you can't use compatibility mode -C ( option) with troffcvt or a troffcvt front end. tblcvt doesn't support vertically-spanned lines. It prints a warning when it detects one, but the table output won't be correct. TBLCVT(1)