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groff: Comments

 
 5.7 Comments
 ============
 
 One of the most common forms of escape sequence is the comment.(1)
 (⇒Comments-Footnote-1)
 
  -- Escape sequence: \"
      Start a comment.  Everything up to the next newline is ignored.
 
      This may sound simple, but it can be tricky to keep the comments
      from interfering with the appearance of the output.  If the escape
      sequence is to the right of some text or a request, that portion of
      the line is ignored, but spaces preceding it are processed normally
      by GNU 'troff'.  This affects only the 'ds' and 'as' requests and
      their variants.
 
      One possibly irritating idiosyncrasy is that tabs should not be
      used to vertically align comments in the source document.  Tab
      characters are not treated as separators between a request name and
      its first argument, nor between arguments.
 
      A comment on a line by itself is treated as a blank line, because
      after eliminating the comment, that is all that remains.
 
           Test
           \" comment
           Test
               => Test
               =>
               => Test
 
      To avoid this, it is common to combine the empty request with the
      comment escape sequence as '.\"', causing the input line to be
      ignored.
 
      Another commenting scheme sometimes seen is three consecutive
      single quotes (''''') at the beginning of a line.  This works, but
      GNU 'troff' emits a warning diagnostic (if enabled) about an
      undefined macro (namely '''').
 
  -- Escape sequence: \#
      Start a comment; everything up to and including the next newline is
      ignored.  This 'groff' extension was introduced to avoid the
      problems described above.
 
           Test
           \# comment
           Test
               => Test Test
 
  -- Request: .ig [end]
      Ignore input until, in the current conditional block (if any),(2)
      (⇒Comments-Footnote-2) the macro END is called at the start
      of a control line, or the control line '..' is encountered if END
      is not specified.  'ig' is parsed as if it were a macro definition,
      Comments-Footnote-3::)
 
           hand\c
           .de TX
           fasting
           ..
           .ig TX
           This is part of a large block of input that has been
           temporarily(?) commented out.
           We can restore it simply by removing the .ig request and
           the call of its end macro.
           .TX
               => handfasting
 

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