Content-type: text/html Manpage of GROFF_MAN

GROFF_MAN

Section: Environments, Tables, and Troff Macros (7)
Updated: 12 September 1999

NAME

groff_man - groff `an' macros to support generation of man pages

SYNOPSIS

groff -man [ options... ] [ files... ]

DESCRIPTION

The tmac.an macros used to generate man pages with groff were written by James Clark. This document provides a brief summary of the use of each macro in that package.

.TP title section [extra1] [extra2] [extra3]: Sets the title of the man page to title and the section to section, which must take on a value between 1 and 8. The value section may also have a string appended, e.g. `.pm', to indicate a specific subsection of the man pages.
.SH text for a heading: Sets up an unindented and unnumbered section heading. Prints out all the text following `.SH' up to the end of the line in bold face, with a size slightly smaller than that for indented section headings.
.SS text for a heading: Sets up an indented section heading. Prints out all the text following `.SS' up to the end of the line in bold face, with a size slightly larger than that for unindented section headings.
.TP [nnn]: Sets up an indented paragraph. The indentation is set to nnn if that argument is supplied. The first line of text following this macro is interpreted as a string to be printed flush-left, as it is appropriate for a label. It is not interpreted as part of a paragraph, so there is no attempt to fill the first line with text from the following input lines. Nevertheless, if the label is not as wide as the indentation, then the paragraph starts at the same line (but indented), continuing on the following lines. If the label is wider than the indentation, then the descriptive part of the paragraph begins on the line following the label, entirely indented. The `.TP' macro is the macro used for the explanations you are just reading.
.LP or .PP or .P: These macros are mutual aliases. Any of them causes a line break at the current position, followed by a vertical space downwards by the amount that is set in the `PD' counter.
.IP [designator] [nnn]: Sets up an indented paragraph, using designator as a tag to mark its beginning. The indentation is permanently set to nnn if that argument is supplied. To set the indentation back to the previous level, one must call some other macro that uses indented paragraphs, and explicitly provide it with the value of the previous indentation.
: For example, the following paragraphs were all set up with bullets as the designator, using `.IP \(bu 4':
*: `IP' is one of the three macros used in tmac.an to format lists.
*: `HP' is another. This macro produces a paragraph with a left hanging indentation.
*: `TP' is another. This macro produces an unindented label (given by the text on the first line following `TP'), followed by an indented paragraph with appropriately descriptive text.
.HP [nnn]: Sets up paragraphs with hanging left indentation. The indentation is set to nnn if that argument is supplied. The following pargraph illustrates the effect of this macro with the hanging indentation set to 2:
: This is a pagraph following an invocation of the `.HP' macro. As you can see, it produces a paragraph where all lines but the first are flushed right and are shorter than the preceding lines.

MACROS TO SET FONTS

.SM: Causes the text on the same line or the text on the next line to appear in a font that is one point size smaller than the default font.
.SB: Causes the text on the same line or the text on the next line to appear in small boldface font.
.BI text: Causes text on the same line to appear alternately in bold face and italic. The text must be on the same line as the macro call. Thus `.BI this word and that' would cause `this' and `and' to appear in bold face, while `word' and `that' appear in italics.
.IB text: Causes text to appear alternately in italic and bold face. The text must be on the same line as the macro call.
.BR text: Causes text on the same line to appear alternately in bold face and roman. The text must be on the same line as the macro call.
.RB text: Causes text on the same line to appear alternately in roman and bold face. The text must be on the same line as the macro call.
.R text: Causes text to appear in roman font. If no text is present on the line where the macro is called, then the text of the next line appears in roman. This is the default font to which text is returned at the end of processing of the other macros.
.B text: Causes text to appear in bold face. If no text is present on the line where the macro is called, then the text of the next line appears in bold face.
.I text: Causes text to appear in italic. If no text is present on the line where the macro is called, then the text of the next line appears in italic.

AUTHOR

This manual page was originally written for the Debian GNU/Linux system by Susan G. Kleinmann <sgk(at)debian.org>, corrected by Werner Lemberg <wl(at)gnu.org>, and is now part of the GNU troff distribution.

This document was created by man2html, using the manual pages.
Time: 19:18:03 GMT, July 18, 2003