It appears that somewhere along the line, probably when notes were integrated into all of AFNI, that the original program was 'pretty-ified' which broke this feature. I'm not sure who is maintaining that program now (Rick? Bob? me?), but I could provide the original print routine (which just printed 1 character at a time, looking for \) to restore this behavour. Or, we could change the help, to undocument this feature
Tom