> I had overlooked/forgotten the 'd' specifier. It's a GNU tbl extension (the original tbl had only "t" for top-aligning, the default being vertically centered).
> I'll have to read the man page more carefully, but I must > admit it's not very easy to understand fully. Since "d" is only valid for vertically spanned items, the trick is to convert the normal table entries into vertically spanned entries, which you can do by following the data line with \^;\^ I'm not sure whether vertically spanning *all* items in a line was ever intended in the design of tbl, but with groff it works great, even to the extent that the vertical size of the entries remains *exactly* what it was without the vertical spanning.
