The ms macro package expects a certain amount of structure: a well-formed document contains at least one paragraphing or heading macro call. Longer documents have a structure as follows.
Calling the RP macro at the beginning of your document puts the
document description (see below) on a cover page. Otherwise, ms
places the information (if any) on the first page, followed immediately
by the body text. Some document types found in other ms
implementations are specific to AT&T or Berkeley, and are not
supported by groff ms.
By setting registers and strings, you can configure your document’s typeface, margins, spacing, headers and footers, and footnote arrangement. See Document Control Settings.
A document description consists of any of: a title, one or more authors’ names and affiliated institutions, an abstract, and a date or other identifier. See Document Description Macros.
The main matter of your document follows its description (if any). ms supports highly structured text consisting of paragraphs interspersed with multi-level headings (chapters, sections, subsections, and so forth) and augmented by lists, footnotes, tables, diagrams, and similar material. See Body Text.
Macros enable the collection of entries for a table of contents (or
index) as the material they discuss appears in the document. You then
call a macro to emit the table of contents at the end of your document.
The table of contents must necessarily follow the rest of the text since
GNU troff is a single-pass formatter; it thus cannot determine
the page number of a division of the text until it has been set and
output. Since ms was designed for the production of hard copy,
the traditional procedure was to manually relocate the pages containing
the table of contents between the cover page and the body text. Today,
page resequencing is more often done in the digital domain. An index
works similarly, but because it typically needs to be sorted after
collection, its preparation requires separate processing.