GROFF_CHAR

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Section: Environments, Tables, and Troff Macros (7)
Updated: 19 July 2002
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NAME

groff_char - groff character names

DESCRIPTION

This manual page lists the standard groff input characters. The output characters in this document will look different depending on which output device was chosen (with option -T for the man(1) program or the roff formatter). Only the characters that are available for the device that is being used to print or view this manual page will be displayed. In the actual version, groff provides only 8-bit characters for direct input and named characters for further glyphs. On ASCII platforms, character codes in the range 0 to 127 (decimal) represent the usual 7-bit ASCII characters, while codes between 127 and 255 are interpreted as the corresponding characters in the Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) code set. On EBCDIC platforms, only the code page cp1047 is supported (which contains the same characters as Latin-1). It is rather straightforward (for the experienced user) to set up other 8bit encodings like Latin-2; since groff will use Unicode in the next major version, no additional encodings are provided. All roff systems provide the concept of named characters. In traditional roff systems, only names of length 2 were used, while groff also provides support for longer names. It is strongly suggested that only named characters are used for all characters outside of the 7-bit ASCII range. Some of the predefined groff escape sequences (with names of length 1) also produce single characters; these exist for historical reasons or are printable versions of syntactical characters. They include \\, \', \`, \-, \., and \e; see groff(7). In groff, all of these different types of characters can be tested positively with the .if c conditional.

REFERENCE

In this section, the characters in groff are specified in tabular form. The meaning of the columns is as follows.

Output: shows how the character is printed for the current device; although this can have quite a different shape on other devices, it always represents the same glyph.
Input name: specifies how the character is input either directly by a key on the keyboard, or by a groff escape sequence.
Input code: applies to characters which can be input with a single character, and gives the ISO Latin-1 decimal code of that input character. Note that this code is equivalent to the lowest 256 Unicode characters; (including 7-bit ASCII in the range 0 to 127).
PostScript name: gives the usual PostScript name of the output character.

ASCII Characters

These are the basic characters having 7-bit ASCII code values. These are identical to the first 127 characters of the character standards ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) and Unicode (range C0 Controls and Basic Latin). To save space, not every code has an entry in the following because the following code ranges are well known.

0-32: Control characters (print as themselves).
48-57: Decimal digits 0 to 9 (print as themselves).
65-90: Upper case letters A-Z (print as themselves).
97-122: Lower case letters a-z (print as themselves).
127: Control character (prints as itself). The remaining ranges constitute the printable, non-alphanumeric ASCII characters; only these are listed below. As can be seen in the table below, most of thes