Thanks Zvezdan,
Your suggestion works!
I mistakenly thought that annotation was turned on by default. It's not. I
was just creating a string [X by putting %X in my refer bibliography, and
refer was just dutifully turning it into a string via ".ds".
.R1
annotate X "de [X"
(other stuff)
.R2
do
> 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
