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.

  

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