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Article #15

nroff garbling

#15
From: utzoohenry
Date: Tue, 02 Feb 1982 15:56
11 lines
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A specific form of the line-begins-with-quote problem:  if the two characters
after the quote are "tr", the rest of the output will be utter trash.  The
problem is that the quote, of course, makes the line an nroff command, and
the tr command is "transliterate":  something like ".tr ab" transliterates
all a's to b's in the output.  Feeding .tr a random argument will cause
random translations in the output, resulting in VERY strange-looking text.
Laura brought this one in.

Fixing the macro package to get around this problem is awkward but may not
be impossible;  IN PRINCIPLE it is possible to change the character used as
nroff's alternate command marker.
Technical Details
Message-ID: <anews.Autzoo.1322>
Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!utzoo!henry

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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!utzoo!henry
From: utzoo!henry
Newsgroups: advising
Subject: nroff garbling
Date: Tue, 02 Feb 1982 15:56:12 +0000
Message-ID: <anews.Autzoo.1322>