Escaping dots in groff

Question

According to info groff (section 5.11 Character Translations), \. should print just the dot. However, this is not what seems to happen. If I render this manpage

.TH x x x x
\.SH foo

I get foo rendered as a section heading, and .SH is not printed.

So, why does this happen, and how do I escape the dot (and the apostrophe) at the begginning of the line in groff?

Answer 1

Simply prepend the dot with a zero-width character:

\&.SH foo

or switch temporarily to another control character:

.cc #
.SH foo
#cc