---
name: "unroff"
section: "1"
platform: "linux"
package: "troffcvt"
version: "1.04+repack1-1"
release: "Debian 12 (Bookworm)"
platforms: ["linux"]
url: "https://new.carta.tech/unroff"
---

# unroff(1)

convert troff documents to plain text

## NAME

unroff - convert *troff* documents to plain text

## SYNTAX

**unroff** \[ **-E** \] \[ **-J** \] \[ **-8** \] \[ **-m***xx* \] \[ *file* ... \]

## DESCRIPTION

*unroff* processes documents written to be formatted with *troff* (or *nroff*, or any of the other *\*roff* variants) and converts them to plain text. This is similar to what *deroff* does, but the result is sometimes better than *deroff* output.

Optional flags may be given to modify the operation of *unroff*, as follows:

- **-E**

  Echo input tokens as they are read. Useful mainly for debugging.

- **-J**

  Join output lines that would be part of a single paragraph so they form a single output line. This is useful if you plan to move the resulting output into a document formatter that treats paragraphs as a single line. The default is to do line wrapping according to the line length specified in the input document.

- **-8**

  Write 8-bit ISO Latin-1 (ISO 8859-1) characters. This option may be useful for producing output intended to be viewed on devices capable of 8-bit character display. Without this option, 8-bit Latin-1 characters will generall appear in the output as \`\`\[\[name\]\]'' where \`\`name'' is the *troffcvt* internal name for the character, e.g., \`\`\[\[Aacute\]\]''. For some of these characters, an ASCII approximation will be used if something reasonably close is available.

- **-m***xx*

  Specify macro package, usually **-man**, **-me**, **-mm**, or **-ms**.

## DIAGNOSTICS

**line length clipped to nnn chars.** A very long line length was requested, so long that it would likely result in output line assembly buffer overflow. The length is clipped to prevent this.

**output buffer capacity exceeded.** This means some line is so long that it couldn't be collected in the output line assembly buffer. Most likely this signals a bug in *tc2text*, since the length is supposed to be kept within reasonable bounds (see previous paragraph).

## SEE ALSO

[**troffcvt**(1)](/troffcvt/1.md), [**tc2text**(1)](/tc2text/1.md)

## WHO-TO-BLAME

Paul DuBois, *dubois@primate.wisc.edu* .

## BUGS

*unroff* doesn't do so well with tables, particularly tables with multiple-line cells. Table centering isn't handled.