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 these characters print as
themselves; the only exceptions are the following characters:
`
the ISO Latin-1 `Grave Accent' (code 96) prints as `, a left single
quotation mark,
aq
the ISO Latin-1 `Apostrophe' (code 39) prints as ', a right single
quotation mark; the corresponding ISO Latin-1 characters can be obtained
with
\`
and
\(aq.
-
the ISO Latin-1 `Hyphen, Minus Sign' (code 45) prints as a hyphen; a
minus sign can be obtained with
\-.
~
the ISO Latin-1 `Tilde' (code 126); a larger glyph can be obtained
with
\(ti.
^
the ISO Latin-1 `Circumflex Accent' (code 94); a larger glyph can be
obtained with
\(ha.
Output Input InputPostScriptNotes
name codename
Latin-1 Special Characters
These characters have character codes between 128 and 255.
They are interpreted as characters according to the
Latin-1
(iso-8859-1)
code set, being identical to the Unicode range
C1 Controls and Latin-1 Supplement.
128-159
the C1 Controls; they print as themselves, but the effect is mostly
undefined.
160
the ISO Latin-1
no-break space
is mapped to
`\ ',
the escaped space character.
173
the soft hyphen control character (prints as itself).
groff never use this character for output (thus it is omitted in the table
below); the input character 173 is mapped onto
\%.
The remaining ranges (161-172, 174-255), called the
Latin-1 Supplement
in Unicode, are printable characters that print as themselves.
Although they can be specified directly with the keyboard on systems
with a Latin-1 code page, it is better to use their named character
equivalent; see next section.
Output Input InputPostScriptNotes
name codename
Named Characters
The named character idiom is the standard way to specify special
characters in roff systems.
They can be embedded into the document text by using escape sequences.
groff(7)
describes how these escape sequences look.
The character names can consist of quite arbitrary characters from the
ASCII or Latin-1 code set, not only alphanumeric characters.
Here some examples:
\c
named character having the name
c,
which consists of a single character (length 1).
\(ch
named character having the 2-character name
ch.
\[char_name]
named character having the name
char_name
(having length 1, 2, 3, ...).
In groff, each 8bit input character can also referred to by the construct
\n[charn]
where
n
is the decimal code of the character, a number between 0 and 255
without leading zeros.
They are mapped onto glyph entities using the
.trin
request.
Moreover, new character names can be created by the
.char
request; see
groff(7).