[Groff] Using groff & tbl for creating a CV

[Chris Schaller]

Did anyone of you roffers ever try to create a CV with groff and tbl?

I started using tbl for that purpose, but I miserably failed with the
output.  Example:

"""
.TS
tab(|);
lll.
Since 05/2006|My Company in Downtown
_
|This is the role I occupied
|T{
.IP -
Working on this
.IP -
Working on that
.IP -
Achieved lots of things
.IP -
But now, this is going to be a rather lengthy description of a task
that I had which is so long that groff is complaining about the length
of the line
T}
07/2003-04/2006|Yet Another Company I Worked For
_
|The role I had there
|T{
.IP -
Some more tasks
.IP -
You will get the idea
T}
.TE
"""

What I am fighting with is the width of the columns:

$ groff -ms -t cv.roff > cv.roff.ps

warning: file `cv.roff', around line 4:
  table wider than line width


Is there any way to specify a maximum width or any other way to achive
my goal having more control over my columns?  Am I completely nuts
trying to do such a wicked thing?

It's also interesting to see that some parts of the data will be bold
("Since 05/2006", "My Company in Downtown", and "This is the role I
occupied") while the text between T{ and T} looks regular, if I
prepend the following line to above example (ms macro):

.NH
Test

But I guess this is intended behaviour and I simply have to switch to
.LP or .PP for normal?

My groff version (running on ubuntu 11.04):

GNU groff version 1.21
Copyright (C) 2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
GNU groff comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You may redistribute copies of groff and its subprograms
under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
For more information about these matters, see the file named COPYING.

called subprograms:

GNU troff (groff) version 1.21
GNU grops (groff) version 1.21

Thanks for any hints/pointers!

- Chris