PS TEXT FORMAT Reference Manual

2 Overview of
TFORM Capabilities
11387 Tandem Computers Incorporated 2–1
Command Overview The TFORM command set is designed to meet the needs of a broad range of
users. You can think of it as having several layers of capability. At its core
are the commands to handle the basic formatting that every document
requires (and that every user uses). Beyond that are the commands that
only more specialized documents require (and that only more sophisticated
users are likely to have need of).
Included in the core are:
The full complement of formatting commands to control margins and
indentation, the placement and content of page headers and footers
(including page numbers), line joining and justification, hyphenation,
sentence and paragraph style, horizontal and vertical pitch, tab stops,
boxed text, and the printing of marginal sequence numbers and change
indicators.
A set of escape sequences that you can include in your text to control
the way text appears (such as boldface, underlining, and
superscripting) and to handle special formatting cases (such as
tabulation, hyphenation, or a required carriage return).
A set of predefined macros that enable you to organize your document
into sections and subsections, to format lists of all types, to manipulate
calendar dates, and to produce form letters.
The second layer of capability, for more advanced users, includes:
A set of control commands to insert nonprinting documentation in the
source file, to source in data from other files, to manipulate auxiliary
files for form-letter production or similar applications, to change font
characteristics, and to define your own control characters.
A set of program commands to perform repetitive formatting; to
perform conditional operations based on evaluation of numeric,
character, or logical expressions; and to create functions and macros
that perform specialized sets of operations whenever they are called (a
macro is like a small program or subroutine; a function is like a macro,
except that it can return a value).