Re: [Groff] Escape characters in -man output

[Keith MARSHALL]

Meg McRoberts wrote:
> However, I tried your command line and I now have ^[ characters
> in the output in addition to the 0* control characters.  I've
> inserted the beginning of the formatted page at the end here
> for your perusal...

Strange;  it works as I would expect, for me -- no sign of an
SGR sequence anywhere.  You are using a lower case "c" in the
"-c" and "-P-c" options, aren't you?

Actually, its the "-P-c" option -- that's upper case "P" and
lower case "c" -- that's critical;  I get indistinguishable
output of manpages, with or without "-c", provided I use "-P-c"
to tell "grotty" not to emit SGR sequences.

BTW, those ^[ characters you are now seeing represent the ASCII
ESC code, which is *always* the first in an SGR sequence.  If
"grotty" is in SGR mode, it will always emit colour control
sequences as "^[[...m".  Since you weren't seeing the ESC codes
in your previous output, I can only conclude that your "col -b"
filter was discarding them.

HTH.

Regards,
Keith.