PS: Somehow I missed to add the output of the first table. Sorry!
I have a second example which uses the .T& table continuation header, and unlike the animal husbandry example, the furniture example does not handle well .T& even though the table is much smaller. I also attach the PDF to show the intended idea. Oliver. On 05/03/2021 22:44, Oliver Corff wrote:
Hi Anthony, You made my day! I had known the alternative manpage formatter mandoc by name for a while but I had never been aware of its built-in tbl processing capabilities. I challenged the mdoc(7) instructions by by providing an extremely minimal file, being just a wrapper, to my tabular material: .\" This is the wrapper wrapper.mdoc used to feed tbl descriptions to mandoc .so my_table_here.tbl mandoc -T html wrapper.mdoc > test.html delivers promising results. Then I became daring and tried mandoc -T html my_table.tbl > test.html and it worked, too. The behemoth table I attached to my first post in this thread came out as intended, still needing a bit of tweaking here and there, but since style instructions are already contained in the file it these offer themselves for manipulation. Tables with horizontal lines do not display perfectly for the moment, but this should be fixable. The only element which I use extensively (for comment boxes below tables, different sections etc.) that is not always treated properly by mandoc is .T& but then, .T& is only a shorthand which saves the effort to store the description of *all* table lines in the tbl header. Just to give an impression of what mandoc can do to a table of average complexity, I included the original and the mandoc conversion result. I use a few macros which are mostly text substituted and did not yet bother to adapt my input file. You can see the output file, it looks definitely promising, much more than I hoped for, and a little bit of tinkering will produce the desired results. Since my goal was a 95:5 goal anyway (save 95% of the manual work by investing 5% of total time) and I was always prepared for intervention, this is the way to go. Thank you very much again, Anthony, and everybody who took the time to read and send private suggestions. Oliver. On 05/03/2021 17:38, Anthony J. Bentley wrote:Hi Oliver, Oliver Corff writes:My problem: I reconstructed approx. 1,400 tables with varying degrees of complexity and size; the two examples attached give a good indication of both ends of the spectrum. My status: All 1,400 tables were converted to pdf and png by wrapping the tbl code in a minimal .ms document the output of which (in case of pdf) was cropped to printed areas, or which was produced by the -Thtml driver. Everything looks as intended, so far. Now the publication goal shifts more and more towards html, I and think converting all tables to html should be my optimal goal.How well does 'mandoc -Thtml' handle your inputs?
.\" so 1979_0142_Bauwesen_Regionaler_Wohnungsbau.tbl .so 1979_0826_Politbuero_Mitglieder.tbl
.\" vim:syntax=groff
.\"
.\" 1979_0743_Moebelindustrie.tbl
.\"
.\" Oliver Corff, 2020-03-03
.\"
.\"
.\"
.so ../Pool/0_Definitionen.roff
.\" fam H
.TS
center nospaces tab(|) decimalpoint(,);
lb s s s
l s s s
l0 c c c
l0 n n n.
Produktion der M\[:o]belindustrie in Mill. Mark
(in konstanten Preisen \[en] kPP\*[sub 75] \[en])
_
| 1960 | 1970 | 1976
_
M\[:o]bel (ohne Metall-
m\[:o]bel) u. Polster-
waren\*[sup "1 2"] | 1 123,7 | 2 296,4 | 4 029,3
Polsterm\[:o]bel\*[sup 1] | 155,7 | 416,5 | 705,7
_
.T&
l s s s.
1 Produktion der Industriebetriebe, ohne Handwerk.
2 Einschlie\[ss]lich M\[:o]belbestandteile.
Quelle: Statistisches Jahrbuch der DDR 1978. S. 120.
.TE
1979_0743_Moebelindustrie.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document
