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 Bugs.  Don't talk to me about bugs.  Email me at esr@snark.thyrsus.com instead.
 
-You can surf to http://www.thyrsus.com/~esr/home.html for updates and related
-resources.
-

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+.TH PHONEGEN 1 "October 24, 1994"
+.SH NAME
+phonegen -- phone-number to letter-mnemonic generator
+.SH SYNOPSIS
+pronegen nnnnnnn
+.SH DESCRIPTION
+This program tries to help you find a letter mnemonic matching a
+given phone number.
+.P
+It emits to standard output each possible pronounceable mnemonic, one
+per line, using the American standard mapping of dial letters to
+numbers (2 goes to ABC, 3 to DEF, 4 to GHI, 5 to JKL, 6 to MNO, 7 to
+PRS, 8 to TUV, 9 to XYZ).
+.P
+The program uses a table of pronounceable letter-triples derived from
+a dictionary scan.  Each potential mnemonic must be such that all of
+its letter-triples are in the table to be emitted.  About 30% of
+possible triples are considered pronounceable.
+.P
+A typical 7-digit phone number has 19,683 possible mnemonics, but this
+test usually cuts the list down to a few hundred or so, a reasonable
+number to eyeball-check.  For some numbers, the list will, sadly, be
+empty.
+.P
+It's best to leave out punctuation such as dashes and parens.
+.SH BUGS
+The filtering method doesn't know what plausible medial triples are
+not reasonable at the beginnings and ends of words.
+.P
+I'm not sure what table position 0 (which is what 0 and 1 are mapped
+to) means.  If you figure it out, you tell me.  I really should have
+generated my own table, but that would have been more work than this
+seemed worth -- if your number contains either, you probably need
+to generate your mnemonic in disjoint pieces arount the digits anyway.
+.SH AUTHOR
+Eric S. Raymond <esr@snark.thyrsus.com>.  It's based on a table of
+plausible letter-triples that had no name attached to it.  Surf to
+http://www.thyrsus.com/~esr/home.html for updates and related resources.
+