Re: [Groff] tbl problems in man

[Michael(tm) Smith]

Tadziu Hoffmann <address@hidden>, 2007-02-08 12:19 +0100:

> I'm not familiar with DocBook, but doesn't it have something
> analogous to HTML's "definition list"?

It does -- DocBook has both a general-purpose element for marking
up associative lists -- which is called variablelist -- and a
specific element for marking of glossary lists, which is called
glosslist.

> It occurs to me that some of the "tables" you're discussing
> might be better served with such a definition list (as is
> actually currently the case).

Yeah, many probably would better be marked up with variablelist.

> Not every two-column table is a definition list, but neither
> is every definition list best presented as a two-column table
> (e.g., the definition tags might have widely varying widths,
> and arbitrarily squeezing them to some narrow column is not
> necessarily the preferred presentation).  The manpage macros
> do not provide a dedicated list environment, but they provide
> the basics (RS, RE, TP) with which such lists can be emulated.
> Turning these lists into tables, though perhaps possible, is
> not necessarily what the original author might have intended.
> (Of course, the reverse might also be true, that a list is
> used although a table is intended, just because this was
> easier to code.)

But as far as I know, doclifter never converts any RS/RE or TP
markup to DocBook table markup, and I can't remember any messages
being posted to this thread suggesting it should (but maybe I
missed something).

> Nevertheless, does anybody here remember the discussion about
> AT&T-tbl's "expand column" feature on this list some months
> back?

I don't remember reading that one. Is it something that solves
this problem of multi-column tbl tables coming out looking so bad?

  --Mike

-- 
Michael(tm) Smith
http://people.w3.org/mike/