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From: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: tbl problems
Message-ID: <2879@phri.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 27-Aug-87 12:31:49 EDT
Article-I.D.: phri.2879
Posted: Thu Aug 27 12:31:49 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 29-Aug-87 12:00:27 EDT
References: <289@future.ursa.UUCP>
Reply-To: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith)
Organization: Public Health Research Inst. (NY, NY)
Lines: 25
Keywords: tbl,troff,eroff,numeric field

In article <289@future.ursa.UUCP> raj@ursa.UUCP (Raj) writes:
> tbl has a bug.  It manifests itself when you have a long table, spanning
> several pages, and there are numeric fields.

	Please folks, when reporting a bug or asking for help, try and give
us some useful information like what kind of system you are using and what
version of the software.  In this case, I just happen to have recognized
the company name and know they have Suns because our Sun service-slug once
mentioned that company as another account they have.  So, I'm guessing that
they are running SunOS3.2.

	Anyway, it's documented in the Sun 3.2 release notes that tbl is
broken, and the the bug manifests itself with "n" format column.  Our work
around was to just replace the distributed tbl binary with the old binary
from 3.0.  Presumably if you have tbl source from another 4.2 system you
could get it to work on Sun3.2.  Presumably this was fixed in 3.3 or 3.4.

	Now, for the $64k question -- why the hell did Sun take tbl, which
has been working fine for many years and break it?  I don't know about
other places, but that single bug alone would have been enough to make 3.2
totaly unusable for us if we couldn't get a working tbl binary.
-- 
Roy Smith, {allegra,cmcl2,philabs}!phri!roy
System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016