Re: [Groff] Choosing a portability target

[Eric S. Raymond]

walter harms <address@hidden>:
> Stuff like tbl,eqn,... is discouraged (somebody mentioned it before) to keep
> thinks simple.

Discouraging TBL is the wrong advice to give nowadays.  It used to make sense,
back before the .\" t convention evolved and when most-third-party viewers
would just ignore .TS/.TE, but the background has changed.

Today I would say "Do use TBL for tables, do *not* make ad-hoc ones using 
,ta, because structured TBL is easier for downstream viewers to parse
unambiguously."

(doclifter handles both TBL and ad-hoc tables, so if it weren't for 
the viewer-portability issue I would not care about this.)
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>