I have to agree with Carsten here: it looks as though Bernd has misundertstood what the authors meant. See in-line below.
On 16-Jul-2014 18:44:35 Carsten Kunze wrote: > Maybe this is a misunderstanding. > >> 1) Sandra L Emerson, Karen Paulsell - troff TYPESETTING for UNIX(TM) >> Systems (1987) >> This book seems to come from System V. >> It documents that "(T)" has the meaning of a tab char for cell jumping. > > On page 80 it is mentioned: "In the following example, the TAB key is > indicated by (T) in the input." > >> 2) David Barron, Mike Rees - Text Processing and Typesetting with UNIX >> (1987) >> It documents that "<T>" has the meaning of a tab char for cell jumping. > > On page 128 it is mentioned: "Note that in this figure, <T> denotes the > tab character." > >> So far, groff does not use these. With these additions the line with >> tab(...); is no longer necessary. > > Is tab(...); really an issue? I don't think so. I do not have the Emerson and Paulsell book, but I do have the Barron and Rees book, from which I can confirm Carsten's qutation from page 128. And also, on page 136 "The global options", it states (of course): "* tab(x) - recognise x as the data separator in place of tab." So there is already adequate flexibility; "(T)" and "<T>" were not intended to be used literally as data separators -- they merely denote whatever is being used as the separtor; and there is no need to consider incorporating them into groff! >> I have now trouble with C++. So could someone else try to add these >> character combinations to the .cpp files in src/preproc/tbl? >> >> It might be possible, to allow also strings in the tab()-line as a first >> step, instead of now only single character methods. > > qtbl is already really very good. And what is qtbl? Best wishes to all, Ted. ------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <ted.hard...@wlandres.net> Date: 16-Jul-2014 Time: 20:48:28 This message was sent by XFMail -------------------------------------------------
