[bug #68513] [troff] document limit on range of indexed character indices

"G. Branden Robinson" <[email protected]> Mon, 13 Jul 2026 11:37:12 -0400 (EDT)

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.printing.groff.bugs
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Follow-up Comment #1, bug #68513 (group groff):

No, any nonnegative `int` is accepted as a character index.

Values larger than 255 are otherwise hard to work with though, as there's a
fixed-size `charset_table` array of 256 entries, and hyphenation codes are
limited to 0-255 as well.

Possibly all you can do with a big character index/"number" like 999 is to
tell the formatter to render the glyph of that index in the current font.

I guess you could set character flags on it.

DWB _troff_ accepted negative character indices in the `\N` escape sequence
but, apparently, would not emit them as-is in "trout" "N" commands.


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