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5.17.6 Special Fonts

Special fonts are those that gtroff searches when it cannot find the requested glyph in the current font. The Symbol font is usually a special font.

gtroff provides the following two requests to add more special fonts. See Using Symbols, for a detailed description of the glyph searching mechanism in gtroff.

Usually, only non-TTY devices have special fonts.

— Request: .special [s1 s2 ...]
— Request: .fspecial f [s1 s2 ...]

Use the special request to define special fonts. Initially, this list is empty.

Use the fspecial request to designate special fonts only when font f is active. Initially, this list is empty.

Previous calls to special or fspecial are overwritten; without arguments, the particular list of special fonts is set to empty. Special fonts are searched in the order they appear as arguments.

All fonts which appear in a call to special or fspecial are loaded.

See Using Symbols, for the exact search order of glyphs.