Hi Ted,
> I *think* what he is trying to do is find out how to create groff
> input such that the character "\" is displayed in the output.
I read it as he's trying to get real ESC characters, ASCII 27, to be
written to the terminal by man in order that he can give a description
of an ANSI escape sequence and then show it in action.
That the man page may be being displayed on a terminal that doesn't
support such control-sequences, or may be being rendered as PostScript
for printing, suggests this isn't a good idea. Perhaps better would be
to give an example command that shows the effect, e.g. using printf(1)
printf 'before\x1b[1mbold\x1b[mafter\n'
and have the user run that if they think their terminal supports it.
Cheers,
Ralph.