Re: man page portability concern

[Paul Eggert]

Wendy Palm <address@hidden> writes:

> Copyright \(co 2003 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
> 
> \(co gives a copyright symbol on my linux box, but
> results in the curser going to the top of the window
> and overwriting on all my other machines
> sun blade (5.8 Generic_108528-19 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Blade-100)
> irix (IRIX64 da 6.5 01200532 IP27)
> and all my Crays.
> 
> can this character be pulled out of the Copyright line?
> or am i missing something here?

I think you're not invoking 'nroff' correctly on the other hosts.
\(co has meant the copyright symbol in troff ever since 1975 or so, so
it should be widely portable, if the nroff/troff commands are set up
properly.

For example, on Solaris 8, 'nroff' by default outputs data suitable
for a Teletype Corporation Model 37 terminal.  If your output device
isn't compatible with that ancient terminal, you need to use the -T
option.  For example, 'nroff -Tlp' will cause \(co to output the three
characters 'c <backspace> O' which should print as something roughly
corresponding to a copyright symbol on printers that understand the
backspace character.

Another possibility on Solaris 8 is to pipe nroff's output through the
'col' command (e.g., 'nroff -man manpage | col'); this will filter out
the model-37 characters and will cause '\(co' to output as 'c', which
is perhaps the best that can be done on some devices.

Another possibility is to install groff
<ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/groff/groff-1.19.tar.gz>; it has a number of
output options to deal with special symbols like the copyright symbol.