$ rpm -q groff groff-1.20.1-3.fc14.x86_64 From the groff(7) man page: | Single-Character Escapes | \. An uninterpreted dot (period), even at start of line. (See also the first bullet point in "CONTROL CHARACTERS".) However, it doesn't seem that the this escape works as documented, assuming I understand how to use it correctly. Reproducer: $ cat t.man foo \.bar quux $ groff -Tascii -wmac ./t.man | head -n 1 ./t.man:2: warning: macro `bar' not defined foo quux I think the output should have been "foo .bar quux" and no warning.
According to upstream response, this is an expected behavior. And it should be fixed in manual page.
It seems that it's still unfixed in the man page as of groff 1.21-8.fc17. I'm wondering what _is_ the way to get uninterpreted dots at start of line if \. is not it?
Sorry for that. I still do not know what exactly is the correct behavior and what should be stated in the manpage. I will need to search some old roff documentation. You can take a look at following threads: http://www.mail-archive.com/bug-groff@gnu.org/msg01499.html http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2011-03/msg00025.html One possible way of printing dot at the beginning of the line is this: groff -Tascii -wmac <<< '\[char46]foo' | head -1 But I think there is also another escape sequence.
groff-1.22.1-1.fc18 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 18. https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/groff-1.22.1-1.fc18
Resolved in: groff-1.22.1-1.fc18 groff-1.22.1-1.fc19
Package groff-1.22.1-1.fc18: * should fix your issue, * was pushed to the Fedora 18 testing repository, * should be available at your local mirror within two days. Update it with: # su -c 'yum update --enablerepo=updates-testing groff-1.22.1-1.fc18' as soon as you are able to. Please go to the following url: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2013-0023/groff-1.22.1-1.fc18 then log in and leave karma (feedback).
groff-1.22.1-1.fc18 has been pushed to the Fedora 18 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.