Large curly brackets in tbl

[Oliver Corff]

Dear All,

I am new to the groff mailing list; Werner suggested I try to ask here.

Currently I am reproducing (typesetting) a pile of historical material
which looks as if typeset with roff and the roff tool chain (tbl, eqn
etc.). My trial output reproducing complex tables looks so similar to
the printed original that it keeps amazing me, virtually no tweaking
needed at all from my side to create a genuinely faithful reproduction
(for historical and educational purposes).

Please forgive me if the following question has been answered before; I
duly searched the archive before posting but did not find any message
which covers my problem.

However, a small handful of the tabular material I work with uses large
curly brackets, both vertical and horizontal; I attach two scanned
reproductions of my original.

I tried to create an otherwise empty pile in eqn:

# left "" pile { "" above "" above "" above "" } right } #

in order to produce a curly bracket of the desired height, but the
solution was not robust (output visible in ps but not in pdf, vertically
grossly misaligned). I am completely clueless with regard to producing a
horizontal curly bracket akin to TeX \underbrace.

Any pointers towards potential information solutions are appreciated.

Thank you very much in advance,

Oliver.

PS: I discovered the beauty and usefulness of the groff system for my
particular purpose only a year ago. Compiling a 42 MB text size document
with 10.000 pages of PDF output and 800 tables is so amazingly fast that
I am left in speechless admiration.

1979_02940002.png
Description: PNG image

1975_421_IDH0001.png
Description: PNG image