GROFF_CHAR(7)

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 (the device currently used is `utf8').

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,

'   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.

  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.

  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).

Ligatures

Accented Characters

Accents

Quotes

Punctuation

Brackets

Arrows

Lines

Text markers

Legalize

Currency symbols

Units

Logical Symbols

Mathematical Symbols

Greek characters

Card symbols

AUTHOR
Copyright © 1989-2000, 2001, 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

This document is distributed under the terms of the FDL (GNU Free Documentation License) version 1.1 or later. You should have received a copy of the FDL on your system, it is also available on-line at the

This document is part of groff, the GNU roff distribution. It was written by with additions by and

SEE ALSO

groff(1)
    the GNU roff formatter.

groff(7)
    a short reference of the groff formatting language.

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