Except in .LR and .RL requests, any text argument denoted t in the request summary may be zero to six words. Quotes " ... " may be used to include blanks in a `word'. If t is empty, the special treatment is applied to the next text input line (the next line that doesn't begin with dot). In this way, for example, .I may be used to italicize a line of more than 6 words, or .SM followed by .B to make small letters in `bold' font.

A prevailing indent distance is remembered between successive indented paragraphs, and is reset to default value upon reaching a non-indented paragraph. Default units for indents i are ens.

The fonts are

R

roman, the main font, preferred for diagnostics

I

italic, preferred for parameters, short names of commands, names of manual pages, and naked function names

B

`bold', actually the constant width font, preferred for examples, file names, declarations, keywords, names of struct members, and literals (numbers are rarely literals)

L

also the constant width font. For graphical display and printing, L=B; when converted to plain text, the arguments of the macros .L, .LR, and .RL are printed in quotes; preferred only where quotes really help (e.g. lower-case literals and punctuation).

Type font and size are reset to default values before each paragraph, and after processing font- or size-setting macros.

The man format admits equations and tables in the style of Unix eqn (equation setting) and tbl (table layout) preprocessors, but do not support arguments on .EQ and .TS macros.

These strings are predefined by man:

\*R

Trademark symbol

\*S

Change to default type size.

/man/*/*

Source files of manual pages.

* n.t.l. = next text line; p.i. = prevailing indent