Elemental typesetting functions can be be laborious to use directly with
complex documents. A macro facility specifies how certain routine
operations, such as starting paragraphs, or printing headers and
footers, should be performed in terms of those low-level instructions.
Macros can be specific to one document or collected together into a
macro package for use by many. groff
supplies versions of
the widely used macro packages man, mdoc, me,
mm, mom, and ms.