My thanks to each of Thomas, Peter, and Ralph for their helpful responses and pointers to documentation. -- Steve
On Sunday, April 10, 2022, 03:42:11 AM CDT, Ralph Corderoy <ra...@inputplus.co.uk> wrote: Hi Steve, Peter wrote: > \& is a zero-width, non-printing character whose most usual use-case > is to prevent groff from interpreting a period at the beginning of an > input line as a control character. groff's info on it: info groff Requests | less -j15 +/'\\\&' And more in §4.1 of CSTR 54: https://troff.org/54.pdf It's also used by tbl to mark the point of alignment in text. -- Cheers, Ralph.