[Groff] Re: another tbl peculiarity

[Werner LEMBERG]

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

Yes.  Added to tbl.man.

> | 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.

It's not clear to me what you mean.  Please elaborate.

I have the impression that heirloom tbl currently doesn't follow the
LxC/(N+1) rule for text block spans larger than one column if there is
at least one `w' specifier.  Am I missing something?  It fails even if
all column widths are specified with `w' -- no guessing necessary at
all in this case.

BTW, I get buggy output for this table also:

  .TS
  tab(;);
  l l l
  l s l.
  a a;T{
  b b b b b b b b
  b b b b b b b b
  T};c c
  T{
  d d d d d d d d
  d d d d d d d d
  d d d d d d d d
  d d d d d d d d
  T};e e
  .TE

The `d' and `e' fields overlap...


    Werner