Re: [Groff] tbl: Standard column width?

[Daniel Leidert]

Am Montag, den 13.03.2006, 07:48 +0100 schrieb Werner LEMBERG:
> > I would like to know, if there is a standard column width, when I use
> > the .TS macro?
> 
> Yes.  If there are N columns, and a text block spans C columns, the
> default width of this text block is
> 
>   \n[.l]*C/(N+1)
> 
> I've added this information to tbl.man.

Thanks. I still have groff 1.18.1.1, where this information is not
available in the manpage.

> > The problem is, that the result of the following code is wrapped
> > text in the second column (independent from MANWIDTH), even if I use
> > expand:
> 
> You might try, say,
> 
>   lw(5u*\n[.l]u/12u)lw(5u*\n[.l]u/12u)
> 
> as the format specificier to slightly increase the width.

Thanks again. Maybe I should tell, why I asked this. tbl is used to
convert the segmentedlist DocBook element into an appropriate manpage
table (see http://docbook.xml-doc.org/snapshots/xsl/manpages/lists.xsl
at the very end). So we were wondering, why a column/cell (content) is
wrapped in a (left-justified) table, when there is (much) space left to
the right. As you can see, now there is a similar workaround for this
problem to what you suggested. So the resulting output would be:

.\" line length increase to cope w/ tbl weirdness
.ll +(\n(LLu * 62u / 100u)
.TS
lll.
... data ...
.TE
.\" line length decrease back to previous value
.ll -(\n(LLu * 62u / 100u)

Are there any objections against this solution?

Regards, Daniel