[Groff] Re: another tbl peculiarity

[Gunnar Ritter]

Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hmm.  While GNU tbl's output is debatable -- it is not documented
> whether minimum width values should be used if a text block span
> contains at least one column *without* a minimum width -- I think that
> heirloom's output is really buggy.  Even for a table specification
> like
>
>   lw(3n) lw(9n) lw(3n)
>   l      s      l.
>
> heirloom tbl only applies the first column width to the whole text
> block span.  This essentially prevents the use of text block spans, so
> I doubt that you should take care of `unexpected changes in existing
> documents'.

It is always possible to have an explicit .ll in the text block,
though. This is also what Lesk's tbl manual advises:

| If no line length is specified in the block of text itself,
| or in the table format, the default is to use LxC/(N+1) where
| L is the current line length, C is the number of table columns
| spanned by the text, and N is the total number of columns in
| the table.

Because this rule is too simplistic for most cases, Bell Labs
tbl requires a .ll for most text blocks anyway. The problem
here is that tbl puts a text block into a formatted diversion
before the actual column widths have been computed, so it can
only guess what they are.

Gunnar