> I had to study your example to understand it. It looks very > robust because, except for TS/TE, it leaves the ms macros out > of the equation.
That was mainly for two reasons: (a) I wanted to demonstrate the general principle independent of any macro package, and (b) I'm not really proficient in ms to judge what the "best practices" would be in this case. However, I've played around a bit and come up with a solution using only ms macros and troff primitives officially endorsed for use with ms, plus mark and return. It works without explicit diversions, at the cost of having to manually adjust for possibly different heights of the two blocks (which might not be an issue for you if both tables have exactly the same height and there are no table notes).
.\" tbl ms .\" ---------------------------------------------------------------- .nr PO 2.5c \" page offset = left margin .nr LL 21c-(2*\n[PO]) \" line length = page width - 2 margins .\" ---------------------------------------------------------------- .PP Foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz. Foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz. Foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz. Foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz. .\" ---------------------------------------------------------------- .KS .mk .nr LL_full \n[LL] .nr Gutter 1c .nr LL_half (\n[LL_full]-\n[Gutter])/2 .nr LL \n[LL_half] .PP .TS \" expand not needed, just for demo center box tab(#) expand; css ccc lnn. Table 1 _ Date#Min#Max 20/09/2013#5.2#12.6 21/09/2013#4.3#11.5 22/09/2013#2.7#10.1 23/09/2013#2.5# 9.7 24/09/2013#3.4#11.6 24/09/2013#4.5#12.7 25/09/2013#5.1#13.2 .TE .I Notes: you can even add some table notes or perhaps a caption. .br .rt .nr LL \n[LL_full] .IP "" \n[LL_half]u+\n[Gutter]u .TS center box tab(#) expand; css ccc lnn. Table 2 _ Date#Min#Max 26/09/2013#6.7#14.5 27/09/2013#5.8#14.0 28/09/2013#5.5#13.7 29/09/2013#5.2#13.5 30/09/2013#5.9#114.1 \01/10/2013#6.5#15.6 \02/10/2013#7.2#16.5 .TE .sp 2 \" space required by notes in other column .KE .\" ---------------------------------------------------------------- .PP Foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz. Foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz. Foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz. Foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz.
tblsidebyside-ms.pdf
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