Hi Dorai, > I have the environment variable GROFF_ENCODING globally set to utf8
That's the cause. It implies groff's -k option, invoking preconv(1). $ preconv <<<'.de ΒΆ' .lf 1 - .de \[u00B6] $ So troff and nroff accept 0xb6, or UTF-8's 0xc2 0xb6, without a care, but preconv filters it out first. Cheers, Ralph.