4 Macro Packages

This chapter surveys the “major” macro packages that come with groff. One, ms, is presented in detail.

Major macro packages are also sometimes described as full-service due to the breadth of features they provide and because more than one cannot be used by the same document; for example

groff -m man foo.man -m ms bar.doc

doesn’t work. Option arguments are processed before non-option arguments; the above (failing) sample is thus reordered to

groff -m man -m ms foo.man bar.doc

Many auxiliary, or “minor”, macro packages are also available. They may in general be used with any full-service macro package and handle a variety of tasks from character encoding selection, to language localization, to inlining of raster images. See the groff_tmac(5) man page for a list. Type ‘man groff_tmac’ at the command line to view it.