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The ms macro package expects a certain amount of structure, but not as much as packages such as man or mdoc.
The simplest documents can begin with a paragraph macro (such as
LP
or PP
), and consist of text separated by paragraph
macros or even blank lines. Longer documents have a structure as
follows:
If you invoke the RP
(report) macro on the first line of the
document, groff
prints the cover page information on its own
page; otherwise it prints the information on the first page with your
document text immediately following. Other document formats found in
AT&T troff
are specific to AT&T or Berkeley,
and are not supported in groff
.
By setting number registers, you can change your document’s type (font and size), margins, spacing, headers and footers, and footnotes. See ms Document Control Registers, for more details.
A cover page consists of a title, the author’s name and institution, an abstract, and the date.7 See ms Cover Page Macros, for more details.
Following the cover page is your document. You can use the ms macros to write reports, letters, books, and so forth. The package is designed for structured documents, consisting of paragraphs interspersed with headings and augmented by lists, footnotes, tables, and other common constructs. See ms Body Text, for more details.
Longer documents usually include a table of contents, which you can
invoke by placing the TC
macro at the end of your document. The
ms macros have minimal indexing facilities, consisting of the
IX
macro, which prints an entry on standard error. Printing the
table of contents at the end is necessary since groff
is a
single-pass text formatter, thus it cannot determine the page number of
each section until that section has actually been set and printed.
Since ms output is intended for hardcopy, you can manually
relocate the pages containing the table of contents between the cover
page and the body text after printing.
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