[Groff] Treatment of annotation paragraphs in refer

[Bill Ward]

Hello,

I'm using refer to print out an annotated bibliography, and would like for
the annotation paragraph to contain troff commands for paragraph breaks, and
maybe even pic diagrams or code fragments.  However, refer turns the
annotation text into one long string defined using the .ds command and all
troff commands are lost; e.g.,

%X First paragraph of annnotation.
.LP 
Second paragraph of annotation.

Is translated by refer into:

.ds [X First paragraph of annnotation. .LP Second paragraph of annotation.

It would be handy if instead it produced:

.de [X
First paragraph of annnotation.
.LP 
Second paragraph of annotation.
..

Right now, I have a little script that picks out all occurrences of .LP,
.PP, .QP, and .XP and puts the line breaks back, but I'm at the point where
I need to do more elaborate things that require the text itself to be
displayed "as-is", and also use other troff commands and macros that have
variable numbers of arguments.  Scripting around this problem is proving
difficult and esthetically displeasing.

Anyone know of any way to circumvent this problem?

Regards,

Bill Ward
ERDC MSRC