Leader characters \a mess up a table - probably a tbl bug

[Jonathan Leffler]

Consider the table definition (complete document):

.TS
tab(@);
lw(9.0c) l.
address@hidden
address@hidden
Longer entries have less address@hidden
.TE

Under groff 1.18.1 on MacOS X (10.3.5), the number (1) of the first 
line of the table is lost completely, but the second entry puts the 
number where you'd expect.  The third line shows that if the text 
segment is longer, the number appears less displaced.


   ABCDEF.............................   [spaces deleted]         1
   ABCDEF                                2
   Longer entries have less error.....        3


This output was produced by 'tbl tblbug.n | nroff -mm', sorry about 
any line wrapping by the emailer.  You get a similar effect in troff 
using 'groff -t -mm tblbug.n > tblbug.ps' and then viewing the 
postscript -- see attachment.

[A much more complicated version of the table with the '\a' leader
characters was used successfully in 1990 (sic) in another version of
troff -- called eroff -- running on 386/iX.]

I tried compiling groff 1.19, but the compilation fails fairly 
horribly under g++ 3.4.0 (compiled by me) and under CC - 'CC (GCC) 3.3 
20030304 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 1495)', but differently.  If you
need those build reports, let me know -- I'm just letting you know why 
I was unable to verify whether the problem is still in groff v1.19.

--
Jonathan Leffler (address@hidden, address@hidden) 
#include <disclaimer.h>
Guardian of DBD::Informix v2003.04 -- http://dbi.perl.org/

tblbug.ps
Description: PostScript document