> I am woefully unenlightened about *roff.

and you consider that a bad thing?  8-)

> Clearly the character string "lt" is "magic" in some way, as it
> appears often in the tmac files in /usr/share/tmac/*

right.  'lt' is probably the name of a macro.

you should use it as:

.Nm \&lt


In general, to be safe, if i'm using _any_ two-letter sequence in
as an argument to a macro, i quote it like that.  what happens is
that the macro being invoked (in this case Nm) can invoke macros
in its arguments, so in this case (and several others i've seen,
such as ".Nm ex" and ".Op Fl x Ar aw" from the nvi man page)
the wrong thing happens to the argument...


chris

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