Text formatting with extended single-byte characters

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If your input device supports characters from the European-language extended character set, you can enter them directly.

Otherwise, use the following ASCII escape sequence form to represent these characters:

The form \[N], where N is the 2- or 4-digit hexadecimal code for the character.

Note: The NCesc form \<xx> is no longer supported.

Text containing extended characters is output according to the formatting conventions of the language in use. Characters that are not defined for the interface to a specific output device produce no output or error indication.

Although the names of the requests, macro packages, and commands are based on English, most of them can accept input (such as file names and parameters) containing characters in the European extended character set.

For the nroff and troff commands and their preprocessors, the command input must be ASCII, or an unrecoverable syntax error will result. International characters, either single-byte or multibyte, can be entered when enclosed within quotation marks and within other text to be formatted. For example, using macros from the pic command:

define foobar % SomeText %

After the define directive, the specified name, foobar, must be ASCII. However, the replacement text, SomeText, can contain non-ASCII characters.