Re: [Groff] tbl problems in man

[Eric S. Raymond]

Michael(tm) Smith <address@hidden>:
> But is there a backward compatible way to avoid T{...T} ?

Probably not in general.  One special case worth capturing in that you 
probably should not emit T{ T} when the cell content is a single token, 
i.e. contains no whitespace.

> And looking in the Macro Index of the groff info page, I see no
> mention of TQ. Where is TQ documented?

I wrote the documentation recently :-).  From groff_man in CVS:

       .TQ    The  TQ macro sets up header continuation for a .TP macro.  With
              it, you can stack up any number of labels (such as  in  a  glos‐
              sary,  or  list of commands) before beginning the indented para‐
              graph.  For an example, look just past the next paragraph.

              This macro is not defined on legacy Unix systems running classic
              troff.  To  be  certain your page will be portable to those sys‐
              tems, copy its definition from the an-ext.tmac file of  a  groff
              installation.

I don't think it's safe for your stylesheets to use it yet.  It won't be until
well after 1.19.3 ships.

More generally, I disagree with Werner's position that TP/TQ is preferable
to tables with T{ T} in them.  I'm going to change groff_mm in accordance 
with his diktat, because it's his package and his call, but I'm not going
to like it.
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>