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NAME

tbl — tbl language reference for mandoc

DESCRIPTION

The tbl language is a table-formatting language. It is used within mdoc(7) and man(7) UNIX manual pages. This manual describes the subset of the tbl language accepted by the mandoc(1) utility.

Tables within mdoc(7) or man(7) are enclosed by the ‘TS’ and ‘TE’ macro tags, whose precise syntax is documented in roff(7). Tables consist of a series of options on a single line, followed by the table layout, followed by data.

For example, the following creates a boxed table with digits centered in the cells.

.TS 
tab(:) box; 
c5 c5 c5. 
1:2:3 
4:5:6 
.TE

When formatted, the following output is produced:

1	2	3
4	5	6

TABLE STRUCTURE

Tables are enclosed by the ‘TS’ and ‘TE’ roff(7) macros. A table consists of an optional single line of table Options terminated by a semicolon, followed by one or more lines of Layout specifications terminated by a period, then Data. All input must be 7-bit ASCII. Example:

.TS 
box tab(:); 
c | c 
| c | c. 
1:2 
3:4 
.TE

Table data is pre-processed, that is, data rows are parsed then inserted into the underlying stream of input data. This allows data rows to be interspersed by arbitrary roff(7), mdoc(7), and man(7) macros such as

.TS 
tab(:); 
c c c. 
1:2:3 
.Ao 
3:2:1 
.Ac 
.TE

in the case of mdoc(7) or

.TS 
tab(:); 
c c c. 
.ds ab 2 
1:\*(ab:3 
.I 
3:2:1 
.TE

in the case of man(7).

Options

The first line of a table may contain options separated by spaces, tabs, or commas and terminated by a semicolon. If the first line does not have a terminating semicolon, it is assumed that no options are specified and instead a Layout is processed. Some options require arguments enclosed by parentheses. The following case-insensitive options are available:

Layout

The table layout follows Options or a ‘T&’ macro invocation. Layout specifies how data rows are displayed on output. Each layout line corresponds to a line of data; the last layout line applies to all remaining data lines. Layout lines may also be separated by a comma. Each layout cell consists of one of the following case-insensitive keys:

Keys may be followed by a set of modifiers. A modifier is either a modifier key or a natural number for specifying the minimum width of a column. The following case-insensitive modifier keys are available:

For example, the following layout specifies a center-justified column of minimum width 10, followed by vertical bar, followed by a left-justified column of minimum width 10, another vertical bar, then a column using bold font justified about the decimal point in numbers:

c10 | l10 | nfB

Data

The data section follows the last layout row. By default, cells in a data section are delimited by a tab. This behaviour may be changed with the tab option. If _ or = is specified, a single or double line, respectively, is drawn across the data field. If \- or \= is specified, a line is drawn within the data field (i.e. terminating within the cell and not draw to the border). If the last cell of a line is T{, all subsequent lines are included as part of the cell until T} is specified as its own data cell. It may then be followed by a tab (or as designated by tab) or an end-of-line to terminate the row.

COMPATIBILITY

The mandoc(1) implementation of tbl doesn't support mdoc(7) and man(7) macros and eqn(7) equations inside tables.

HISTORY

The tbl utility, a preprocessor for troff, was originally written by M. E. Lesk at Bell Labs in 1975. The GNU reimplementation of tbl, part of the groff package, was released in 1990 by James Clark. A standalone tbl implementation was written by Kristaps Dzonsons in 2010. This formed the basis of the implementation that is part of the mandoc(1) utility.

AUTHORS

This tbl reference was written by Kristaps Dzonsons <kristaps@bsd.lv>.