by Trent A. Fisher and Werner Lemberg - The GNU Operating System

32 The GNU Troff Manual
4.3.2 General structure of an ‘ms’ document
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:
Document type
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.
Format and layout
By setting number registers, you can change your document’s
type (font and size), margins, spacing, headers and footers, and
footnotes. See Section 4.3.3 [ms Document Control Registers],
page 33, for more details.
Cover page
A cover page consists of a title, the author’s name and institution,
an abstract, and the date. 2 See Section 4.3.4 [ms Cover
Page Macros], page 36, for more details.
Body 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 Section 4.3.5
[ms Body Text], page 38, for more details.
Table of contents
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.
2 Actually, only the title is required.