The fundamental task of the autoformat subroutine is to identify and rearrange independent paragraphs in a text. Paragraphs typically consist of a series of lines containing at least one non-whitespace character, followed by one or more lines containing only optional whitespace. This is a more liberal definition than many other formatters use: most require an empty line to terminate a paragraph. Paragraphs may also be denoted by bulleting, numbering, or quoting (see the following sections).