I am writing some script which will utilize cURL, was interested whether I needed to explicitly set various options or whether they are set by default, and thus pulled up http://php.net/manual/en/function.curl-setopt.php. Often the manually will explicitly state that a given option's default value is true or false, and while curl_setopt() does so for many of them, it doesn't do so for others.
It appears that the manual communicates the default value by typing it in bold, but as I have never read that the manual uses this convention, I went off searching for it and was surprised to find that either there is no instructions on how to use the manual or that they are incredible hard to find.
Does the PHP manual indicate default Boolean values by using bold font. Is there any documentation which describes this and other conventions used by the manual?
The title of the middle column in the option list is Set value to. This means you're supposed to assume that the value specified in that column is not the default, and it's telling you what value you need to provide explicitly to cause the behavior described in the description of the option.
In some cases the default is dependent on other options or the PHP environment. This will be mentioned in description or the Notes column.