May be formatted inline or as a displayed block, depending on context.

Formatting reference pages may require a fairly sophisticated processing system. Much of the meta-information about a reference page (its name, type, purpose, title, and classification) is stored in wrappers near the beginning of the refentry.

Common presentational features, such as titles and running heads, may require data from several of these wrappers plus some generated text. Other formatting often requires that these elements be reordered.

If a refdescriptor is present, it should be used for the short topic name. This name usually appears in the running header along with the manvolnum in print media. It may also appear in tables of contents and the index.

Common attributes and common linking attributes.

any attribute

Any attribute in any other explicit namespace

These elements contain refdescriptor: refnamediv.

The following elements occur in refdescriptor: text, abbrev, accel, acronym, alt, anchor, annotation, application, author, biblioref, buildtarget, citation, citebiblioid, citerefentry, citetitle, classname, code, command, computeroutput, constant, coref, database, date, editor, email, emphasis (db._emphasis), emphasis (db.emphasis), enumidentifier, enumname, enumvalue, envar, errorcode, errorname, errortext, errortype, exceptionname, filename, firstterm (db._firstterm), firstterm (db.firstterm), footnote, footnoteref, foreignphrase (db._foreignphrase), foreignphrase (db.foreignphrase), function, glossterm (db._glossterm), glossterm (db.glossterm), guibutton, guiicon, guilabel, guimenu, guimenuitem, guisubmenu, hardware, indexterm (db.indexterm.endofrange), indexterm (db.indexterm.singular), indexterm (db.indexterm.startofrange), initializer, inlineequation, inlinemediaobject, interfacename, jobtitle, keycap, keycode, keycombo, keysym, link, literal, macroname, markup, menuchoice, methodname, modifier, mousebutton, nonterminal, olink, ooclass, ooexception, oointerface, option, optional, org, orgname, package, parameter, person, personname, phrase (db._phrase), phrase (db.phrase), productname, productnumber, prompt, property, quote (db._quote), quote (db.quote), remark, replaceable, returnvalue, revnumber, shortcut, subscript, superscript, symbol, systemitem, tag, templatename, termdef, token, trademark, type, typedefname, unionname, uri, userinput, varname, wordasword, xref.