As output for a script, I produce inut for tbl. However, when a table seems to reach an end of page, the borders of a table go all over the place. As an example:
│ │ │ │
│ │ │ │
│ │ │ │
│ │ ‐ 1 ‐ │ │
│ │ │ │
│ │ │ │
│ │ │ │
4. The in3 intermediate data structure │
│ │ │ │
In3 is an intermediate language. The goal of the
intermediate language is to provide all the content in the
right │order, in such a way that the output‐filters can
(this is nroff-output). The column-borders conform to table at the bottom of the page.
This mainly seems to happen when a table is fully specified (i.e. for every row, a line is written in the header), for example:
.TS
allbox,center;
l l l
l l l
l l l
l l l
l l l
^ l l
l l l.
I must do this, because I do not know beforehand when two rows need a merged cell (^).
I tried to put in a conditional new page before every table, but that is less obvious than it looks, because a) nroff (text output) and groff (ps-output) do not seem to handle this the same way and b) it is difficult (due to possible multi-line cells) to predict how long a table will be.
I would like a solution that does not force me to begin a new page for every table.
It may be sufficient just to fully specify the table by giving it an explicit table header, which needs to be repeated at the start of the next page after a page split. You may also need to use macros -mm or -ms, which are also doing end-of-page handling, and need to co-operate with tbl and the T# macro it creates for this purpose.
The format is
.TS H
options ;
format .
heading
.TH
data
data
.TE
The heading line above can be omitted, but you still need the .TH and the .TS H.
I made some tests with groff 1.22.3 and the following example, with a forced page length (.pl) of 14 lines worked well with -mm but not with -ms.
( echo .pl 14
echo .TS H
echo 'allbox,center;'
for ((i=1;i<5;i++)); do echo 'l l l'; done
echo '^ l l'
for ((i=1;i<5;i++)); do echo 'l l l'; done
echo 'l l l.'
echo .TH
for ((i=1;i<11;i++)); do echo -e 'a\tb\tc';done
echo .TE
) >t
tbl t | nroff -mm
Here's part of the output, with the blank lines removed:
- 1 -
+--+---+---+
|a | b | c |
+--+---+---+
|a | b | c |
+--+---+---+
- 2 -
+--+---+---+
|a | b | c |
+--+---+---+
- 3 -
+--+---+---+
| | b | c |
|a +---+---+
| | b | c |
+--+---+---+