Re: Long text in tbl won't wrap, maybe related to mom

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi Bento, Peter, and Kurt!

At 2021-02-05T17:31:45-0500, Peter Schaffter wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 05, 2021, Bento Borges Schirmer wrote:
> > I'm having great joy composing little documents for some homework
> > and assignments using groff and the mom package.  Yesterday I
> > wanted to learn how to make tables so I read through mom's
> > excellent documentation and reproduced all tables except the last
> > one from L. L. Cherry and M. E. Lesk's Tbl --A Program to Format
> > Tables, when I encountered a problem where the lines wouldn't
> > wrap:

This is an excellent thing to do!  On my mental to-do list is
construction of a similar set, unencumbered by Alcatel-Lucent's
copyright, that we can use in the groff tree as both an example suite
and a regression test of our tbl(1) implementation.

> Tbl appears to require that adjusting be turned off in order to
> process text blocks correctly, which mom is not presently doing.  If
> you precede calls to '.TS' with '.na', and follow calls to '.TE' with
> '.ad', tables process as expected.

Yes.  Last month I argued to Bjarni that "text blocks" in tbl tables are
thus named because they are to be rendered as the remainder of the
"text"[1].  The issue came up on on the Linux man-pages list[2] as well.
I updated our tbl(1) man page to try to make this issue more clear[3].

At 2021-02-06T16:52:56-0500, T. Kurt Bond wrote:
> And I'd like to point out that this problem is *not* something
> specific to mom - it happens with all the macro packages for troff.  I
> recently mentioned
> <https://groups.google.com/g/pandoc-discuss/c/m9O-uJ6rT1M/m/v4fLh5jcCAAJ>
> this problem in regard to the -ms output that pandoc produces on
> pandoc-discuss <https://groups.google.com/g/pandoc-discuss?pli=1>,
> providing a lua filter that fixed the problem by wrapping the pandoc
> output in .na/.ad pairs, and as a result they changed the default to
> include the .na/.ad pairs.

Yes.  I would only add that man page writers should not use this
technique.  Instead, they should switch off adjustment _within_
individual text blocks as needed by using the ".na" request.

Regards,
Branden

[1] ...after applying whatever changes the column specifier would make;
    e.g. "b" to switch to bold style.
    https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2021-01/msg00072.html
[2] https://marc.info/?l=linux-man&m=161186754606738&w=2
    https://marc.info/?l=linux-man&m=161194989004245&w=2
[3] 
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/commit/?id=550ab5338e04e54539214997315f451c89ac25e6

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