Re: [Groff] making tbl created tables fit on the paper

[Nick Stoughton]

Sorry this reply is a little late!

I've had similar problems with long tables, particularly where a column
is longer than a page ... that is, there are too many lines between
T{ and }T to fit this column on a single page. In this case, tbl says 

warning: page 236: table text block will not fit on one page

In my case, I was able to work-around this by using mm's .MC to switch
to multi-column mode, since the tbl actually just contained several
columns of text. With this, you can also use .NCOL to move to the next
column, but beware this doesn't solve many of the problems ... a column
that reaches the end of the page will cause a move to the next column,
so if it matters which column particular text lands in, then this isn't
necessarily the best answer!

The only other method I have had any success with is to simply split the
table by hand into page sized pieces. Interestingly, "old" tbl/troff
(tbl on Solaris, for example) doesn't suffer from this, and correctly
splits the table across several pages, so I suspect this is actually a
groff tbl bug. 

Width related problems usually result in the message:

stdin:9597: warning [p 331, 3.0i, div `3tbd4,5', 0.3i]: can't break line


The already suggested approaches of reducing the inter-column spacing,
reduced inter-word spacing, etc are usually the best bets, and switching
to landscape also helps if the table is on a page by itself. 
-- 
Nick Stoughton                          Cell: 510 388 1413
USENIX Standards Liaison                Fax:  510 548 5738