Alphabetical Summary of man Macros
Brian Kernighan describes the reason for macro packages very pithily:
Since bare troff is unusable by humans, a race of gods now gone created macro packages for mortals to use.
Today, the man macros are the most widely used macro package. They are used for writing program manual pages for the online manual, accessed via the man command.
As many as six arguments may be given for all the macros that change fonts or produce a heading. The seventh and later arguments are ignored. Use double quotes around multiple words to get longer headings.
The .TS, .TE, .EQ,
and .EN macros are not defined by
the man macros. Because nroff and troff ignore unknown requests, you can still
use them in your manpages; tbl and
eqn work with no problems.
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