how far can i go with grotty?

[Marc Chantreux]

hello roffers,

i wrote this filter

    sed '
    1i.TS\
    tab(:);\
    lB l l l.
    $a.TE
    ' | tbl |groff -kTutf8 | sed '/^$/q'

so i can get readable tables as stdout of my shell scripts. i wrote it
as a hack but now i'm wondering ...

* I already know (using man command) that groff is good for positioning
* I just looked at the code of tty.cpp and it
  seems to be able to deal with colors and SGR_REVERSE CSI "7m"

so i wonder if there would be a way to have some text macros to render
colored and reversed table headers when rendering in a terminal but
can also be used when i need some pdf docs.

also: i need "sed '/^$/q'" at the end of my filter because groff
renders a lot of empty lines at the end of the output whenever i
use b in my tbl format. i don't know how to remove it.

any tought (even to tell me how stupid my ideas are) are welcome.

regards
marc