URL: <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?68535>
Summary: [tbl] draw full-width horizontal rules only as wide
as table contents
Group: GNU roff
Submitter: gbranden
Submitted: Fri 17 Jul 2026 05:24:34 PM UTC
Category: Preprocessor tbl
Severity: 2 - Minor
Item Group: Rendering/Cosmetics
Status: None
Privacy: Public
Assigned to: None
Open/Closed: Open
Discussion Lock: Unlocked
Planned Release: None
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Follow-up Comments:
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Date: Fri 17 Jul 2026 05:24:34 PM UTC By: G. Branden Robinson <gbranden>
Right now, horizontal rules that run the full width of a table stretch all the
way to device's "line length".
Occasionally, that produces a jarring result. I know of two such scenarios:
1. viewing documents (usually _man_(7) pages) in very wide terminals, where
even sizable text blocks fit easily on one output line with a great distance
to the right margin; and
2. _grohtml_(1) output, where perverse consequences arise because the line
length is set to an artificially huge amount to prevent hyphenation, and the
_pre-grohtml_ run of _troff_ to render table contents as PostScript takes that
value seriously, making the table horizontally gigantic for no good reason,
which exposes it either to truncation, a source of buggy rendering, or the
gynormous width forces the image to scale down so far that the text becomes
unreadable.
I propose making horizontal rules draw only as wide as the computed table
width.
This might be as easy as issuing the `\D` commands that draw a full-table
horizontal rule interpolate the value of `TW` register.
However, at present I think GNU _tbl_ doesn't distinguish "full-width" rules
from partial ones, so a distinction might need to be coded to support this.
I don't think the "length of a full-width horizontal rule in _tbl_" is
anywhere **specified**, so I'm classifying this in the "Rendering/Cosmetics"
Item Group instead of "Feature Change".
If people gripe nevertheless, we might add a GNU-specific region option to
govern this parameter.
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