PS TEXT FORMAT Reference Manual

Introduction to TFORM
11387 Tandem Computers Incorporated 1–3
You can put multiple commands in a line, separated by semicolons. If you
do this, only the first command on the line is preceded by a trigger; don’t
put triggers before the subsequent commands in the line.
Note An exception to this general rule is the COMMENT command. If you include a COMMENT
command on a line with other commands, it must be the last command on the line: TFORM
views everything to the right of a comment as commentary and does not print it. In addition,
you must always keep the trigger with the symbolic version of the COMMENT command (\!).
See the description of COMMENT in Section 3 for more details.
The Command Name
The second part of a command is the command name, which is sometimes
followed by one or more options that supply additional information
qualifying the command. In this manual, command names (and other
keywords that may appear in commands) always appear in capital letters,
to identify them as keywords. When you type them in your document,
though, TFORM doesn’t care whether you use uppercase or lowercase
letters.
In most cases, you can abbreviate keywords with as few as three characters.
(Later, when you start creating your own variable and macro names, you’ll
have to make sure that their names are different from TFORM keywords
within the first three characters; otherwise, you won’t be able to abbreviate.)
Values
The third part of a command, not always present, is one or more variable
values that you supply. In this manual, these values appear as lowercase
letters set in italics: int means that you must use an integer for that value,
char represents a character, and so on. You might want to refer to the
“Notation Conventions” summary in the “Preface” section to see the
symbols and abbreviations used to represent the various types of values,
and their characteristics, as well as the general rules for representing
commands and other program entities.