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

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Jonathan,

> 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

See tbl(1);  \a doesn't work as you'd expect.  It suggests

    $ echo '.ds a \a/.TS/tab(:);/l l./a:b/a\a:b/a\*a:b/aaa\*a:b/.TE' |
    > tr / \\012 | groff -Tascii -t | grep .
    a       b
    a....       b
    a....   b
    aaa..   b
    $ 

> [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.]

Strange.  If you're sure about this, then it may be worth discussing it
further with the groff people, either here or on the groff mailing list.

Cheers,

-- 
Ralph Corderoy.      http://inputplus.co.uk/ralph/     http://troff.org/