Many of these keywords act as switches, turning a particular feature on or off. For example, the options page and type define defaults for printing the page number and output type at the top of each page automatically, and are therefore more commonly used in their negative form to switch off these facilities when they are not required.

Some options can be switched off by preceding the keyword with the word no. Thus, printing of page number and output type are switched off by the options nopage and notype. Options in which the keyword is followed by an equals sign lose the equals sign when no is added; thus, scale= becomes noscale.

In all cases except page, pc, type, and wmerrors the negative version of these keywords is the default and would not normally appear on the a statement. You would probably use it on a sectbeg, flt or tab statement to turn off the default for a particular table or group of tables. This will be discussed more fully in the appropriate sections.

You can switch off global suppression of small absolutes, column or total percentages by setting the suppression value to zero (for example, smsupp=0). Again, you would normally do this on a flt or tab statement to cancel a run-level option for a specific table or group of tables only.