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Re: [Groff] ?Bug in tbl?


From: Ted Harding
Subject: Re: [Groff] ?Bug in tbl?
Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2008 19:11:52 +0100 (BST)

On 20-Aug-08 17:47:47, Tadziu Hoffmann wrote:
>> The following does not come out as I would expect
> [snip]
> After a bit of experimentation (use option "allbox" to make the
> widths visible) I believe the behavior can be explained as
> follows:
> 
> For calculating the cell widths, all cell contents are inspected
> *independently*.  Thus, the apparently longest line ("Let her
> fame spread far and wide") does not see the "\s[18]" of the other
> cell and is therefore assumed to be at the default point size,
> and the width of the cell is computed accordingly.  On output,
> however, the individual cells are not sandboxed, so the "\s[18]"
> stays in effect, leading to the "strange" appearance.

Excellent detective work, Tadziu! Thank you very much.

In view of your conclusions, I tried setting the point-size in
the column specifiers (to force tbl to know the font-size), and
this worked:

.LP
.TS
centre tab(#);
cp24.
\fBZIMBABWE\fP


.T&
cp28.
\f[BI]Translation\fP


.T&
lp18.
God bless Africa,

Let her fame spread far and wide

Hear our prayer:

May God bless us!

Come, Spirit, come!

Come! Holy Spirit!

Come and bless us, her children!
.TE

This produced exactly what I want. There is an underlying issue
remaining, however, which may be worth thinking about.

Namely: tbl often has to cope with stuff that no-one can know
the length of until troff has finished with it. In particular,
equations entered using things like ${x + y} over {u + w}$.

Now, tbl does have a mechanism for creating number-registers
which will be evaluated by troff, precisely for this kind of
thing. So I'm wondering why this did not come into play here!

Thanks again!
Ted.

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Date: 20-Aug-08                                       Time: 19:11:49
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