Re: A few observations regarding tbl

[T. Kurt Bond]

I would have thought .tr would be of use here, but I can't get it to
translate a space to something else, probably due to how its arguments are
parsed.  (It doesn't strip off a leading double quote, of course.)  Cursory
experiments with .char didn't seem to work either.

So I tried manually replacing spaces with the Unicode character U+2423
(OPEN BOX): ␣ (if that shows up in your mail client).  I remember seeing
spaces represented with a similar glyph in various sources.  That character
is not in the Courier font, but is in DejuVuSansMono, so I installed the
DejaVu fonts (thanks to Peter Schaffter's install-font.sh
<https://www.schaffter.ca/mom/mom-06.html#install-font> script) and that
worked ok.  It should be possible to run the tbl source of your tables
through a script that substitutes the OPEN BOX character for all spaces.

I was going to suggest that the script change tabs into the Unicode
Character CIRCLED LATIN CAPITAL LETTER T, but that's not in
DejaVuSansMono.  (Lesk used a T overstruck on a circle.)

And then I got to thinking: If you want something in Courier (so as to not
have to install a font), you might try substituting Unicode Character WHITE
CIRCLE for spaces and WHITE SQUARE for tabs.  That is not mnemonic as the
circled T and OPEN BOX, alas.  Or you could use the groff characters \[ci]
and \[sq]; that would probably be easier than messing with Unicode
characters.  Or you could try overstriking S and T on \[ci], although when
I try that the result has the bottom of the S and T over the bottom of the
circle.

Anyway, here's the test document I used:

.na
.LP
This is a paragraph.
.LP
DejaVuSansMonoR:
.br
.ft DejaVuSansMonoR
This␣is␣a␣sentence.
.br
What␣to␣do␣now?
.br
.LP
Courier:
.ft C
.br
This○is□a◊sentence with Unicode WHITE CIRCLE, and WHITE SQUARE.
.br
This\[ci]is\[sq]a\[ci]sentence with groff characters \\[ci], and \\[sq].
.LP
Using "\fC.char \\[overstrucks] \\o'\\[ci]\\s[-4]S\\s0'\fP", etc.
.br
.char \[overstrucks] \o'\[ci]\s[-4]S\s0'
.char \[overstruckt] \o'\[ci]\s[-4]T\s0'
.ft C
This\[overstrucks]is\[overstruckt]a\[overstrucks]sentence with overstruck
characters and .char.
.LP
This is a paragraph.

and here is what the output looks like:
[image: image.png]
Does anybody have other ideas?


On Fri, Jun 18, 2021 at 9:16 AM Oliver Corff <oliver.corff@email.de> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I thought over the subject and I decided to write a new introduction to
> tbl, akin to Lesk's introduction, but under FLOSS license and with a
> focus on the gnu extensions.
>
> For this purpose, I have one obviously uninformed and stupid question.
> How do I show code examples in groff (I think I'll opt for the ms macro
> set) with the whitespace character 0x20 marked, akin to the \verb*|...|
> command in LaTeX? \verb|...| produces the included text in tt courier
> (or another fixed-pitch font suitable for displaying code) with spaces
> shown as blank, whereas \verb*|...| inserts a special symbol for every
> 0x20 character.
>
> Does the ms macro package feature an environment for displaying source
> code, or do I mimick that with font and margin settings?
>
> Since my introduction will demonstrate things like nospaces, tab
> settings etc., it would be nice to show the spaces in the source code.
>
> Thanks a lot, and I am happy to take the beating if this question
> demonstrates that I was the last one to ask.
>
> Oliver.
>
>
> On 17/06/2021 18:46, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> > Hi, Oliver!
> >
> > At 2021-06-15T12:39:02+0200, Oliver Corff wrote:
> >> my huge text project which involved typesetting approx. 1,300 tables,
> >> tiny, small, large and huge, demonstrated that tbl is a remarkably
> >> powerful and reliable tool for this work, and I can say with
> >> confidence that the question which type of table software to use
> >> (LaTeX? (x)html?  others?) was best answered by tbl which helped me
> >> recreate tables with a fidelity so close to the printed sources that
> >> the uninitiated reader could not tell an image of the page from the
> >> typeset reproduction.
> > That's excellent news!
> >
> > What is the copyright licensing status of these 1,300 tables?  Is there
> > a chance we could get a small, potentially simplified subset of them
> > under a FLOSS license so that we could use them to illustrate GNU tbl's
> > feature set?  An excellent property of Lesk's tbl paper was the suite of
> > examples, but we don't have that document in our distribution and the
> > few examples in our tbl(1) man page compare poorly.
> >
> > Speaking of the feature set, how much of GNU tbl's feature set do you
> > figure you ended up exercising by the end of this project?  Was there
> > anything that you expected to use but ended up not needing?
> >
> >> I came across a few very minor discrepancies between expected and
> >> actual behaviour, though.
> >>
> >> 1) For the global option "tab(x)", the man page says:
> >>
> >>      tab(x) Use the character x instead of a tab to separate items in a
> >> line of input data.
> >>
> >> This works as long as x is a 7-bit ascii character, it does not work
> >> with utf-8 characters. E.g.: "tab(|)" (with the pipe symbol) works,
> >> "tab(¦)" does not work and yields the message: "argument to `tab'
> >> option must be a single character".
> >>
> >> I suggest either specifying "7-bit ascii character" in the manpage
> >> and/or make the tbl parser utf8-aware.
> > Hmmm, yes--since tbl parses the table for itself, *roff special
> > character escapes will not serve as a workaround.  And UTF-8 support
> > would be a significant undertaking.
> >
> > I've filed this as <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?60790>.
> >
> >> 2) The global option "nospaces", according to the manpage, is
> >> described as:
> >>
> >>      Ignore leading and trailing spaces in data items (GNU tbl only).
> >>
> >> The following point may be a question of correct interpretation of
> >> this statement. Does the underbar "_" qualify as a data item in this
> >> terminology? I positively think so, because the manpage states
> >>
> >>      If  a  data  line  consists of only ‘_’ or ‘=’, a single or double
> >> line, respectively, is drawn across the table at that point;
> >>
> >> If my data line consists of a single '_', that line is drawn. However,
> >> if that '_' is followed by spurious whitespace, then only the '_'
> >> appears in the first cell, and no line is drawn, or a line spanning
> >> the first cell only is drawn. From a logical point of view, this is
> >> clear, as the statement says "consists of only ...", but the nospaces
> >> option does not seem to work here as expected.
> > Doug's follow-up to this point seems reasonable.  For me, it reinforces
> > the principle I espouse that diligent management of one's lexicon is one
> > of the most important things you can do in a software project.
> >
> > When revising the tbl(1) man page in the future, I will attend closely
> > to the uses of the terms "data line" and "data item", and try to make
> > sure they're correct and consistent.
> >
> > I once got partway through a rewrite of tbl(1) (the page) once, with
> > much terminological alteration around "global option", "column
> > specifier", and "column modifier".  I disfavor the term "global option",
> > because "global" options don't persist beyond a .TS/.TE table region,
> > not even in the same document.  I don't think novice users' concept of
> > something "global" stops anywhere short of the entire file they're
> > editing.
> >
> > I ran out of steam on that project because there was just too damn much
> > I wanted to fix about the man page.  Not having a separate document (as
> > AT&T tbl had) to point the user to for practical examples was a major
> > problem, hence my request above.  Coming up with a good suite of
> > examples is itself a significant undertaking, and while I found the
> > examples contributed by Bernd to be contrived and meager, I couldn't
> > honestly say that they weren't better than nothing.
> >
> > In my ideal world, tbl(1) would describe the syntax of the command and
> > its input (or the latter could be migrated to a tbl(7) page--I suspect
> > that would win Ingo's support and it wouldn't bother me at all), and
> > we'd have a separate tbl.ms document chock full of source alongside
> > rendered examples for users to emulate, experiment with, and build
> > their expertise with.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Branden
>
>

-- 
T. Kurt Bond, tkurtbond@gmail.com, https://tkurtbond.github.io