UNIX° TEXT PROCESSING

Formatting with tbl

Some information is best presented in tabular format, that is, displayed in rows and columns. You can structure data in columns using tabs, but that can be difficult, especially if the table consists of long lines of text. The tbl preprocessor was designed to make it easier to prepare complicated tables, such as the following.

Production of Audio Equipment (units: 1000 sets)
Product	1984	1985
General radio	8,895	8,770
Clock radio	5,467	6,500
Radio/cassette	29,734	27,523
Tape deck	11,788	14,300
Car radio	9,450	10,398
Car stereo	15,670	17,456

With tbl, you can center, left justify, and right justify columns of data or align numeric data within a column. You can put headings that span one or more columns or rows, and draw horizontal and vertical lines to box individual entries or the whole table. An entry may contain equations or consist of several lines of text, as is usually the case with descriptive tables. A table can have as many as 35 columns and essentially an unlimited number of rows.

When you use tbl, you should have an idea or, better still, a written design of the table. Then, using a few tbl specifications, you can define how a formatted table should look, The data is entered row by row; each column is separated by ordinary tabs.

For example, the tbl description for the previous table looks like this:

.TS center,box; c s s ...