[Groff] tbl and inter-column spacing

[Joerg van den Hoff]

hi,

I  have  not  used  `tbl'   for  some  time  and now see the
following behaviour, which was not present before, I'm quite
sure:

the  inter-column  space  seems  to be zero, i.e. in a table
with all left centered columns the longest entry (max. width
entry,  I  mean)  in  each column "touches" the neighbouring
entry in the same row (in the next column),  i.e.  it  looks
something like this, for instance:

------
a  b
foobar
------

if  column  1 has entries 'a' and 'foo' and column 2 'b' and
'bar'.  which sure it should not.

I was not lucky in the docs and the mail archive. so:

question  1:  is  there  a  way  to specify the inter-column
spacing (minimal distance between end of some entry and next
entry in the same row)? a register I should know of, e.g.?

question  2:  I have'nt seen this behaviour in the past. how
come?  has there been a change of default behaviour or am  I
doing something wrong which only surfaced now?


joerg


PS: I'm using `tbl' in conjunction with the `ms' macros and
groff version 1.19.3 under MacOS.