Re: long nroff tables

[Oliver Corff]

Hi James,

try this:

TS H
center nospaces tab(:);
lb s
l l.
Service Branches
_
Service                     : Person in Charge
_
.TH

Customer Complaints  : Willy Nickel
Merchandise Return     : Ebenezer Scrooge

.\" fill many, many lines here ...

.TE

You'll see that tbl treats "Service:Person In Charge" as recurring
header, separated by rules above and below, and the page break algorithm
will break the table appropriately while observing the maximum length of
text as set by the macro package (-ms, -mm, etc.) and the page size.

Hth,

Oliver.


On 20/01/2021 17:36, James K. Lowden wrote:
> How do I show "infinite" tables in nroff?  When the tbl output doesn't
> fit on one "page", I get:
>
> $ nroff -t foo
> error: page 2: table will not fit on one page; use .TS H/.TH with a
> supporting macro package
>
> I don't understand how man/mdoc arrange for nroff to display one long
> page (e.g., for "man bash").  I guess it's something the man system
> does when groff is invoked.
>
> For my purpose, I'm displaying SQL output.  I don't particularly want
> to use any macro package; just tbl is enough to get nicely word-wrapped
> wide columns.
>
> --jk