Re: A few observations regarding tbl

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi, Oliver!

At 2021-06-15T12:39:02+0200, Oliver Corff wrote:
> my huge text project which involved typesetting approx. 1,300 tables,
> tiny, small, large and huge, demonstrated that tbl is a remarkably
> powerful and reliable tool for this work, and I can say with
> confidence that the question which type of table software to use
> (LaTeX? (x)html?  others?) was best answered by tbl which helped me
> recreate tables with a fidelity so close to the printed sources that
> the uninitiated reader could not tell an image of the page from the
> typeset reproduction.

That's excellent news!

What is the copyright licensing status of these 1,300 tables?  Is there
a chance we could get a small, potentially simplified subset of them
under a FLOSS license so that we could use them to illustrate GNU tbl's
feature set?  An excellent property of Lesk's tbl paper was the suite of
examples, but we don't have that document in our distribution and the
few examples in our tbl(1) man page compare poorly.

Speaking of the feature set, how much of GNU tbl's feature set do you
figure you ended up exercising by the end of this project?  Was there
anything that you expected to use but ended up not needing?

> I came across a few very minor discrepancies between expected and
> actual behaviour, though.
> 
> 1) For the global option "tab(x)", the man page says:
> 
>     tab(x) Use the character x instead of a tab to separate items in a
> line of input data.
> 
> This works as long as x is a 7-bit ascii character, it does not work
> with utf-8 characters. E.g.: "tab(|)" (with the pipe symbol) works,
> "tab(¦)" does not work and yields the message: "argument to `tab'
> option must be a single character".
> 
> I suggest either specifying "7-bit ascii character" in the manpage
> and/or make the tbl parser utf8-aware.

Hmmm, yes--since tbl parses the table for itself, *roff special
character escapes will not serve as a workaround.  And UTF-8 support
would be a significant undertaking.

I've filed this as <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?60790>.

> 2) The global option "nospaces", according to the manpage, is
> described as:
> 
>     Ignore leading and trailing spaces in data items (GNU tbl only).
> 
> The following point may be a question of correct interpretation of
> this statement. Does the underbar "_" qualify as a data item in this
> terminology? I positively think so, because the manpage states
> 
>     If  a  data  line  consists of only ‘_’ or ‘=’, a single or double
> line, respectively, is drawn across the table at that point;
> 
> If my data line consists of a single '_', that line is drawn. However,
> if that '_' is followed by spurious whitespace, then only the '_'
> appears in the first cell, and no line is drawn, or a line spanning
> the first cell only is drawn. From a logical point of view, this is
> clear, as the statement says "consists of only ...", but the nospaces
> option does not seem to work here as expected.

Doug's follow-up to this point seems reasonable.  For me, it reinforces
the principle I espouse that diligent management of one's lexicon is one
of the most important things you can do in a software project.

When revising the tbl(1) man page in the future, I will attend closely
to the uses of the terms "data line" and "data item", and try to make
sure they're correct and consistent.

I once got partway through a rewrite of tbl(1) (the page) once, with
much terminological alteration around "global option", "column
specifier", and "column modifier".  I disfavor the term "global option",
because "global" options don't persist beyond a .TS/.TE table region,
not even in the same document.  I don't think novice users' concept of
something "global" stops anywhere short of the entire file they're
editing.

I ran out of steam on that project because there was just too damn much
I wanted to fix about the man page.  Not having a separate document (as
AT&T tbl had) to point the user to for practical examples was a major
problem, hence my request above.  Coming up with a good suite of
examples is itself a significant undertaking, and while I found the
examples contributed by Bernd to be contrived and meager, I couldn't
honestly say that they weren't better than nothing.

In my ideal world, tbl(1) would describe the syntax of the command and
its input (or the latter could be migrated to a tbl(7) page--I suspect
that would win Ingo's support and it wouldn't bother me at all), and
we'd have a separate tbl.ms document chock full of source alongside
rendered examples for users to emulate, experiment with, and build
their expertise with.

Regards,
Branden

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