Re: [Groff] Escaping punctuation marks in troff

[Robert Goulding]

On Wednesday, October 29, 2003, at 02:14 PM, Divya Dhakar wrote:
>

> 1. I am not a member of the list. Please let me know how to become a 
> member
> of the list.

> http://ffii.org/mailman/listinfo/groff/

> 2. secondly, I want to parse a 'html' file and convert it to troff 
> format.
> so, i cannot change the characters.

Surely it could be filtered through sed on the way to troff...?

>     so, the line that i parse is "She said "Hello World!" to me. "
> This is suppose the heading of the paragraph so it is preceeded by .ip

Wouldn't you be better using .uh (unnumbered heading)?  Like this:

.uh "She said ""Hello World"" to me."
.lp
This is the text of the paragraph.

I'm pretty sure this is what you're after, rather than an indented 
paragraph; the argument to .ip is supposed to be small (a bullet, 
number, single word etc.).

> I followed your advice to doubleline the quote but I get the following
> output:
>
> - Testfile :
> .ip "She said ""Hello world!:"" to me. "
>
> - command used:
> nroff -me testfilename | more
>
> - output i get:
>
>      Hello World !"  to me " .       ti -120u Hello World !"
>      to me ">=120 she said  "Hello World !"  to me
>
> Notes:
>
> So, the line does print but i have a lot of garbage value in there. 
> Did u
> get the same output when u tried to run it or am I doing soemthing 
> wrong!!!
No, I don't get this at all.  This is very odd:  troff requests are 
being passed through to the output uninterpreted.  I do recall that a 
similar bug existed, for a very short time, in an earlier version of 
groff.  Which version are you using?  BTW, what happens if you ask for 
postscript output (groff -me filename > filename.ps)?

Robert.