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(groff)Miscellaneous

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Miscellaneous
=============

   This section documents parts of `gtroff' which cannot (yet) be
categorized elsewhere in this manual.

 - Request: .nm start inc space indent
     Prints line numbers in the left margin.  START is the line number
     of the _next_ output line; this defaults to 1.  INC indicates on
     which lines numbers are printed, i.e. 5 means put line numbers on
     every 5 lines; this defaults to 1.  SPACE is the space to be left
     between the number and the text; this defaults to 1.  The fourth
     argument is the indentation of the line numbers.  Without
     arguments, line numbers are turned off.

 - Request: .nn [skip]
     Temporarily turns off line numbering.  The argument is the number
     of lines not to be numbered; this defaults to 1.


 - Request: .mc char dist
     Prints margin characters to the right of the text.  The first
     argument is the character to be printed, and the second argument
     is the distance away from the main body text.  With no arguments
     the margin characters are turned off.  If this occurs before a
     break, no margin character is printed.

     This is quite useful for indicating text that has changed, and, in
     fact, there are programs available for doing this (they are called
     `nrchbar' and `changebar' and can be found in any
     `comp.sources.unix' archive.


 - Request: .lf line filename
     A debugging aid for documents which are split into many files,
     then put together with `soelim' and other preprocessors.  The
     second argument is the name of the file and the first argument is
     the input line number in that file.  This way `gtroff' can produce
     error messages which are intelligible to the user.