Part of the

troff troff (), short for "typesetter roff", is the major component of a document processing system developed by Bell Labs for the Unix operating system. troff and the related nroff were both developed from the original roff. While nroff was inte ...

suite of

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, an ...

document layout tools, tbl is a preprocessor that formats

tables Table may refer to: * Table (furniture), a piece of furniture with a flat surface and one or more legs * Table (landform), a flat area of land * Table (information), a data arrangement with rows and columns * Table (database), how the table d ...

in preparation for processing with troff/

nroff nroff (short for "new roff") is a text-formatting computer program, program on Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It produces output suitable for simple fixed-width computer printer, printers and computer terminal, terminal windows. It is an ...

Overview

Mike Lesk Michael E. Lesk (born 1945) is an American computer scientist. Biography In the 1960s, Michael Lesk worked for the SMART Information Retrieval System project, wrote much of its retrieval code and did many of the retrieval experiments, as well as ...

is the original author of tbl. Like the main troff program, it uses command lines interspersed with data to be printed. Because of the nature of tabular

data In the pursuit of knowledge, data (; ) is a collection of discrete Value_(semiotics), values that convey information, describing quantity, qualitative property, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of sy ...

having rows and columns, tbl commands also intraline delimiters for fields and to indicate where to draw lines. First a line starting with .TS, followed by full table options such as center to center the table on a line or box to draw a box around it (boxes in tbl are drawn with overlapping hyphens and underscores; there were no line drawing commands at the time of creation. Disjoint edges can be observed upon close inspection). Succeeding lines set up the formatting of each cell in the table with one character flags, such as c to center data in its cell,

hyphen The hyphen is a punctuation mark used to join words and to separate syllables of a single word. The use of hyphens is called hyphenation. ''Son-in-law'' is an example of a hyphenated word. The hyphen is sometimes confused with dashes ( figure ...

s to draw horizontal rules, vertical bars to draw vertical rules, and

caret Caret is the name used familiarly for the character , provided on most QWERTY keyboards by typing . The symbol has a variety of uses in programming and mathematics. The name "caret" arose from its visual similarity to the original proofreade ...

s to span cells vertically. The last formatting ends a

period Period may refer to: Common uses * Era, a length or span of time * Full stop (or period), a punctuation mark Arts, entertainment, and media * Period (music), a concept in musical composition * Periodic sentence (or rhetorical period), a concept ...

indicate cell data follows. The data comes next, one line per row, with tabs (by default) separating cells. Finally a line containing just .TE ends the table. This is just a summary of tbl syntax, which can vary in small details from implementation to implementation. GNU troff ( groff), Heirloom troff, and mandoc contain tbl implementations.

References

{{Reflist

External links

L.L.Cherry, M.E.Lesk. Tbl - A Program to Format TablesMan page for tbl(1)

tbl Part of the troff suite of Unix document layout tools, tbl is a preprocessor that formats tables in preparation for processing with troff/nroff. Overview Mike Lesk is the original author of tbl. Like the main troff program, it uses command l ...

Overview

See also

References

External links