NAME
groff_char - groff character names
DESCRIPTION
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groff_char(7)
This file is part of groff (GNU roff).
File position: <groff_src_top>/man/groff_char.man
Last update: 20 July 2002
Copyright (C) 1989-2000, 2001, 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
written by Werner Lemberg <wl@gnu.org>
with additions by Bernd Warken <bwarken@mayn.de>
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or
any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with the
Invariant Sections being this .ig-section and AUTHOR, with no
Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts.
A copy of the Free Documentation License is included as a file called
FDL in the main directory of the groff source package.
A copy of the GNU Free Documentation License is also available in this
Debian package as /usr/share/doc/groff/copyright.
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+\w'
Input'u+\n(Spu +\w'
Input'u+\n(Spu +\w'periodcentered'u+\n(Spu
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This manual page lists the standard
groff
input characters.
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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).
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Only the characters that are available for the device that
is being used to print or view this manual page will be
.
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In the actual version,
groff
provides only 8-bit characters for direct input and named characters
for further glyphs.
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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.
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On EBCDIC platforms, only the code page
cp1047
is supported (which contains the same characters as Latin-1).
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It is rather straightforward (for the experienced user) to set up other
8bit encodings like
R Latin-2 ;
since
groff
will use Unicode in the next major version, no additional encodings
are provided.
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All roff systems provide the concept of named characters.
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In traditional roff systems, only names of length 2 were used, while
groff also provides support for longer names.
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It is strongly suggested that only named characters are used for all
characters outside of the 7-bit ASCII range.
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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.
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They include
R \ ,
R \' ,
R \` ,
R \- ,
R \. ,
and
R \e ;
see
groff(7).
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In groff, all of these different types of characters can be tested
positively with the
.if c
conditional.
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REFERENCE
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In this section, the characters in groff are specified in tabular
form.
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The meaning of the columns is as follows.
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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.
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Input name
specifies how the character is input either directly by a key on the
keyboard, or by a groff escape sequence.
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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.
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Note that this code is equivalent to the lowest 256 Unicode characters;
(including 7-bit ASCII in the range 0 to 127).
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PostScript name
gives the usual PostScript name of the output character.
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ASCII Characters
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These are the basic characters having 7-bit ASCII code values.
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These are identical to the first 127 characters of the character
standards ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) and Unicode (range
R C0 Controls and Basic Latin ).
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To save space, not every code has an entry in the following because
the following code ranges are well known.
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0-32
Control characters (print as themselves).
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48-57
Decimal digits 0 to 9 (print as themselves).
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65-90
Upper case letters A-Z (print as themselves).
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97-122
Lower case letters a-z (print as themselves).
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127
Control character (prints as itself).
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The remaining ranges constitute the printable, non-alphanumeric ASCII
characters; only these are listed below.
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As can be seen in the table below, most of these characters print as
themselves; the only exceptions are the following characters:
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\`
the ISO Latin-1 `Grave Accent' (code 96) prints as `, a left single
quotation mark,
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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
R \(aq .
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-
the ISO Latin-1 `Hyphen, Minus Sign' (code 45) prints as a hyphen; a
minus sign can be obtained with
R \- .
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~
the ISO Latin-1 `Tilde' (code 126); a larger glyph can be obtained
with
R \(ti .
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^
the ISO Latin-1 `Circumflex Accent' (code 94); a larger glyph can be
obtained with
R \(ha .
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Latin-1 Special Characters
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These characters have character codes between 128 and 255.
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They are interpreted as characters according to the
Latin-1
(iso-8859-1)
code set, being identical to the Unicode range
R C1 Controls and Latin-1 Supplement .
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128-159
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the C1 Controls; they print as themselves, but the effect is mostly
undefined.
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160
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the ISO Latin-1
no-break space
is mapped to
R `\ ' ,
the escaped space character.
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173
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the soft hyphen control character (prints as itself).
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groff never use this character for output (thus it is omitted in the table
below); the input character 173 is mapped onto
R \% .
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The remaining ranges (161-172, 174-255), called the
Latin-1 Supplement
in Unicode, are printable characters that print as themselves.
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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.
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Named Characters
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The named character idiom is the standard way to specify special
characters in roff systems.
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They can be embedded into the document text by using escape sequences.
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groff(7)
describes how these escape sequences look.
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The character names can consist of quite arbitrary characters from the
ASCII or Latin-1 code set, not only alphanumeric characters.
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Here some examples:
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I c
named character having the name
R c ,
which consists of a single character (length 1).
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I \( ch
named character having the 2-character name
R ch .
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I \[ char_name ]
named character having the name
char_name
(having length 1, 2, 3, ...).
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In groff, each 8bit input character can also referred to by the construct
I \n[char n ]
where
n
is the decimal code of the character, a number between 0 and 255
without leading zeros.
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They are mapped onto glyph entities using the
.trin
request.
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Moreover, new character names can be created by the
.char
request; see
groff(7).
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+\w'Input'u+\n(Spu-1n +1n +\w'periodcentered'u+\n(Spu
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Ligatures
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Accented Characters
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Accents
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Quotes
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Punctuation
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Brackets
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Arrows
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Lines
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Text markers
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Legalize
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Currency symbols
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Units
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Logical Symbols
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Mathematical Symbols
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Greek characters
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Card symbols
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AUTHOR
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Copyright 1989-2000, 2001, 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
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This document is distributed under the terms of the FDL (GNU Free
Documentation License) version 1.1 or later.
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You should have received a copy of the FDL on your system, it is also
available on-line at the
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This document is part of
R groff ,
the GNU roff distribution.
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It was written by
with additions by
and
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SEE ALSO
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groff(1)
the GNU roff formatter.
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groff(7)
a short reference of the groff formatting language.
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R An extension to the troff character set for Europe ,
E.G. Keizer, K.J. Simonsen, J. Akkerhuis; EUUG Newsletter, Volume 9,
No. 2, Summer 1989
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