colonel@sunybcs.UUCP (George Sicherman) (01/20/84)
This is a reposting of an article that got lost in the snarl. Our version (4.1BSD) of tbl produces spurious "delimiter" characters in the nroff lines for the fields themselves. Normally these are control-B's, with control-C's before the first field and after the last. This SEEMS to be a bug. If the fields themselves contain nroff-recognizable control characters, the delimiters may even be printable characters, which would certainly mess up a table. Even the non-printing delimiters undermine some features - try using the -me special characters in a troffed TBL table. Chaos! The obvious fix is, don't write the delimiters! But then why does tbl write them in the first place? If nobody supplies a good answer within a couple of weeks, I'm going to implement the fix and see what happens. Col. G. L. Sicherman ...seismo!rochester!rocksvax!sunybcs!colonel