Re: [Groff] Groff conversion with 190 characters in each line

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi,

Tadziu wrote:
> > I did realise that, then got distracted, did something else, and
> > came back to the email and was thinking about .cc and .c2.  :-)
>
> Sorry, I wasn't thinking either. If we choose as control and escape
> character some little-used ASCII control characters which we are sure
> will not appear in the input file, then there is no need to escape or
> prepend anything, so filtering will not be necessary.

Agreed.  http://troff.org/54.pdf 10.1 says the first eight are OK except
^@, ^A, and ^D.  The header and footer macros would need to use the new
.cc though rather than `.' AIUI.

Playing around a little with changing the escape character, I'm
confused...

    $ cat escape
    .nf
    1 \n(.l
    2 \\
    3 \e
    4 \\,\e
    .ec x
    1 xn(.l
 A  2 xx
    3 xe
 B  4 xx,xe
    end
    $
    $ nroff <escape | grep .
 A  <standard input>:8: cannot use newline as a starting delimiter
 B  <standard input>:10: warning: numeric expression expected (got `\e')
    1 1560
    2 \
    3 \
    4 \,\
    1 1560
    2 3 x
    4
    end
    $

The first 1-4 come out as I'd expect.  2 and 4 have trouble after `.ec
x' though I don't know why.  10.1 says

    The escape character can be changed with ec, and all that has been
    said about the default \ becomes true for the new escape character.

BTW, the `(got `\e')' is a little misleading given it got "xe".

Cheers, Ralph.