aeb@cwi.nl (Andries Brouwer) (11/02/87)
In article <6628@brl-smoke.ARPA> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>) writes: >In article <10048@brl-adm.ARPA> davis%xenurus@gswd-vms.Gould.COM (Tim Davis) writes: >>Has anyone modified tbl to permit > 63 text excursions? > >I started completely overhauling "tbl" and got mostly finished before >other projects took precedence. The real constraint lies in troff >register names. I was able to extend the number somewhat, but not >dramatically. > I, too, started modifying tbl and added many features before I decided that my tables were too complicated for tbl to handle. When one has very long tables (say, stretching over 50 pages), most entries of which take only little space, but with occasional very wide entries, then one might want columns of a width accomodating 98% of the entries, and do something reasonable when a wide entry comes along (like, putting it on a line of its own, if possible centered at the corresponding column). This is easy to achieve with a ditroff macro, but complicated in tbl. Concerning the constraint on register names, this is easy to overcome at the price of some additional processing. First feed everything to troff only in order to find out about the widths occurring, and then compute table dimensions and feed everything again to troff. Now one only needs a fixed number of registers, instead of a number proportional to the input length. -- Andries Brouwer -- CWI, Amsterdam -- uunet!mcvax!aeb -- aeb@cwi.nl