[bug #57665] tbl: want better TTY support for extremely long tables

[G. Branden Robinson]

URL:
<https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?57665>

Summary: tbl: want better TTY support for extremely long
tables
Project: GNU troff
Submitted by: gbranden
Submitted on: Sat 25 Jan 2020 01:35:07 PM UTC
Category: Preprocessor tbl
Severity: 1 - Wish
Item Group: New feature
Status: None
Privacy: Public
Assigned to: None
Open/Closed: Open
Discussion Lock: Any
Planned Release: None

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Details:

When I view pages like groff_char(7) on a terminal, continuous rendering is
enabled. This is nice because the man(7) macros don't make assumptions about
the page length that way, and you get smoothly flowing text that is
interrupted by page headers and footers.

Unfortunately, tbl is a preprocessor and doesn't know that the page length is
effectively infinite. This causes it to insert breaks in long tables.
Without the page headers and footers these look like single blank lines, the
same you get from blank input line in table, or .sp, or .sp 1, as recently
discussed on the ***@gnu.org list.

The net result is ugliness and potential confusion.

How can we get tbl to pretend the page length is unbounded, or stop
introducing blank vertical space at the page boundaries?




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[G. Branden Robinson]

Follow-up Comment #1, bug #57665 (project groff):

/you get smoothly flowing text that is interrupted by page headers and
footers./s/interrupted/not &/

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[Bjarni Ingi Gislason]

Follow-up Comment #2, bug #57665 (project groff):

File "tmac/an-old.tmac"

A) You put the requests in the macro TS.

1) in the scope of nroff

2) save the current page length

3) define the new page length

B) In the macro TE

1) in the scope of nroff

2) restore the page length saved in the macro TS.


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[Dave]

Follow-up Comment #3, bug #57665 (project groff):

Would the change proposed in _bug #55124 comment #1
<http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?55124#comment1>_ help with this?

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[G. Branden Robinson]

Follow-up Comment #4, bug #57665 (project groff):


[comment #3 comment #3:]

Post by Dave
Would the change proposed in _bug #55124 comment #1

<http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?55124#comment1>_ help with this?

It very well might. I think the idea presented there (give a negative
argument to the .pl request "infinite length" semantics).

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[Benno Schulenberg]

Follow-up Comment #5, bug #57665 (project groff):

Upvoting this. These seemingly spurious blank lines have long perplexed and
annoyed me -- as seen for example in the Name Index of man 3 ncurses. It
would be nice to be able to suppress them when output goes to a TTY.

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