UNROFF(1)

💖 UNROFF(1) — like, the glow-up page for your *roff docs 💖

okay bestie, welcome to UNROFF(1), straight outta the General Commands Manual 🎀 she's a little chaotic, she's a little iconic, and she turns your crunchy *roff markup into actual readable text. let's get into it ✨

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🌸 NAME 🌸

unroff — convert troff documents to plain text 🦋

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⭐ SYNTAX ⭐

unroff [ -E ] [ -J ] [ -8 ] [ -mxx ] [ file ...  ]

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

okay so here's the tea ☕ unroff takes documents that were written to be formatted with troff (or nroff, or literally any of the other *roff variants, she's not picky) and converts them into plain text. it's giving similar-to-what-deroff-does energy, except ngl the result is sometimes better than deroff output 👑 no cap.

you can pass optional flags to change up how unroff operates, and here they are, bestie:

• -E — echo input tokens as they're read. this is mostly a debugging thing, so like, don't expect it to be cute, expect it to be noisy 🙈
• -J — join output lines that would've been part of one single paragraph so they become one single output line. this is lowkey perfect if you're planning to move the resulting output into a document formatter that treats paragraphs as a single line 🫶 the default, though, is to do line wrapping according to the line length specified in the input document. so like, -J is the main character choice here 💅
• -8 — write 8-bit ISO Latin-1 (ISO 8859-1) characters ✨ this one's useful for producing output you plan to view on devices that can actually display 8-bit characters. 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]]` 😭 and for some of these characters, an ASCII approximation gets used if something reasonably close is available. so it's giving ✨approximation✨ vibes
• -mxx — specify macro package, usually -man, -me, -mm, or -ms 🎀

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💀 DIAGNOSTICS 💀

• line length clipped to nnn chars. — a very long line length was requested. like, SO long that it would likely result in output line assembly buffer overflow 😱 so the length gets clipped to prevent that. she's protecting you, fr fr.
• output buffer capacity exceeded. — this means some line is so long 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). so... yeah. that one's a tc2text problem, not a you problem 🫠

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👑 SEE ALSO 👑

troffcvt(1), tc2text(1)

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🌈 WHO-TO-BLAME 🌈

Paul DuBois, dubois@primate.wisc.edu. that's the icon to blame, bestie 💜

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🦋 BUGS 🦋

unroff doesn't do so well with tables 😭 particularly tables with multiple-line cells. and table centering isn't handled. periodt. she's not perfect, she's just doing her best 🌸

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and that's the whole page, bestie!! this was UNROFF(1) from the General Commands Manual — footer says the same thing, so you know she's official 💅🎀✨