Yes, it's the same spec, though reimplementated; there was no BCPL compiler for the PDP-11. I edited the v7 manual and I believe I proofread every man page. How could I have overlooked the misbehavior of the .li request*, which was even then not in the reference manual's list of n/troff requests? On closer examination, .li does appear in a condensed alphabetical list of requests--and it appears in the source. But if Joe never described it, it's no surprise that groff dropped it. It is totally unnecessary--a bit of special pleading rendered obsolete by Joe's elegant invention of \&. doug * .li causes the next line to be read literally, even if it begins with a dot.