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4.6.1.1 Basic information
.........................

'ms' documents are plain text files; prepare them with your preferred
text editor.  If you're in a hurry to start, know that 'ms' needs one of
its macros called at the beginning of a document so that it can
initialize.  A "macro" is a formatting instruction to 'ms'.  Put a macro
call on a line by itself.  Use '.PP' if you want your paragraph's first
line to be indented, or '.LP' if you don't.

   After that, start typing normally.  It is a good practice to start
each sentence on a new line, or to put two spaces after sentence-ending
punctuation, so that the formatter knows where the sentence boundaries
are.  You can separate paragraphs with further paragraphing macros, or
with blank lines, and you can indent with tabs.  When you need one of
the features mentioned earlier (*note ms::), return to this part of the
manual.

   Format the document with the 'groff' command.  'nroff' can be useful
for previewing.

     $ editor radical.ms
     $ nroff -ww -z -ms radical.ms # check for errors
     $ nroff -ms radical.ms | less -R
     $ groff -T ps -ms radical.ms > radical.ps
     $ see radical.ps

   Our 'radical.ms' document might look like this.

     .LP
     Radical novelties are so disturbing that they tend to be
     suppressed or ignored, to the extent that even the
     possibility of their existence in general is more often
     denied than admitted.

     ->That's what Dijkstra said, anyway.

   'ms' exposes many aspects of document layout to user control via
'groff''s "registers" and "strings", which store numbers and text,
respectively.  Measurements in 'groff' are expressed with a suffix
called a "scaling unit".

'i'
     inches

'c'
     centimeters

'p'
     points (1/72 inch)

'P'
     picas (1/6 inch)

'v'
     vees; current vertical spacing

'm'
     ems; width of an "M" in the current font

'n'
     ens; one-half em

   Set registers with the 'nr' request and strings with the 'ds'
request.  "Requests" are like macro calls; they go on lines by
themselves and start with the "control character", a dot ('.').  The
difference is that they directly instruct the formatter program, rather
than the macro package.  We'll discuss a few as applicable.  It is wise
to specify a scaling unit when setting any register that represents a
length, size, or distance.

     .nr PS 10.5p \" Use 10.5-point type.
     .ds FAM P    \" Use Palatino font family.

In the foregoing, we see that '\"' begins a comment.  This is an example
of an "escape sequence", the other kind of formatting instruction.
Escape sequences can appear anywhere.  They begin with the escape
character ('\') and are followed by at least one more character.  'ms'
documents tend to use only a few of 'groff''s many requests and escape
sequences; see *note Request Index:: and *note Escape Sequence Index::
or the 'groff(7)' man page for complete lists.

'\"'
     Begin comment; ignore remainder of line.

'\n[REG]'
     Interpolate value of register REG.

'\*[STR]'
     Interpolate contents of string STR.

'\*S'
     abbreviation of '\*[S]'; the name S must be only one character

'\[CHAR]'
     Interpolate glyph of special character named CHAR.

'\&'
     dummy character

'\~'
     Insert an unbreakable space that is adjustable like a normal space.

'\|'
     Move horizontally by one-sixth em ("thin space").

   Prefix any words that start with a dot '.' or neutral apostrophe '''
with '\&' if they are at the beginning of an input line (or might become
that way in editing) to prevent them from being interpreted as macro
calls or requests.  Suffix '.', '?', and '!' with '\&' when needed to
cancel end-of-sentence detection.

     My exposure was \&.5 to \&.6 Sv of neutrons, said Dr.\&
     Wallace after the criticality incident.