On Tue, 15 Nov 2011 23:52:51 +0100
Tadziu Hoffmann <hoffm...@usm.uni-muenchen.de> wrote:
Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions, Tadziu. I had to
do some more reading and experimenting to understand your suggestions.
> .TS
> box nokeep;
> c | cb cb | cb s s s s | c
> c | cb cb | c c c c c | c
> n | n n | n n n n n | n.
> Number Market Quintile Average Relative to
> Market Average Stocks Average Q1 Q2
> Q3 Q4 Q5 Q1\[en]Q5 _
I appreciate the boldface and, especially, the en-dash.
> > 2. The last two rows in the first table are too tall.
> > I think it's the footnotes, but I don't understand why.
>
> To determine the height of a text block, groff renders the
> block into a temporary diversion and then reads the height of
> that diversion. Apparently, the footnotes are also formatted
> into that diversion, and accordingly use up space, which,
> however, is not actually used when the table is finally output,
> since the footnotes are placed outside the table cell.
>
> A quick fix for this would be to simply ignore the footnotes
> when not in the top-level diversion, like so:
>
> T{
> Annualized Return*
> .if !'\n(.z'' .ig
> .FS
> * (footnote text)
> .FE
> ..
> T}
Pasting your .if line verbatim provoked syntax errors:
<standard input>:9: zero field width
This line compiles, but has no effect:
.if ! '\n(.z'' .ig
I added a space after the ! operator.
AIUI, we're comparing \n(.z -- the name of the current diversion -- to a
zero-length string. I don't know if a top-level diversion has no
name, but this one does. If I use this:
T{
Annualized Return\*[*]
.if ! '\n(.z'' .ig
.tm \n(.z
.FS
Compounded Annualized Return
.FE
T} abc
I get this on stderr:
$ make
groff -ms -t -G -p -T dvi -P-l t.ms > t.dvi
3tbd3,0
> A better solution might perhaps be to do this already in
> the FS/FE macros.
That's a little beyond my reach as yet! I learned enough about writing
macros to know that I can't just write "wrapper" macros, but not enough
to be sure how I might improve on the current GNU ms .FS
implementation.
Thanks again for your time. I had hoped footnotes-in-tables was an
easy question. Now that it's not, it's more interesting. And
evidently harder than it should be.
--jkl
