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Like the main troff program, tbl uses command lines interspersed with data to be printed. Because of the nature of tabular data having rows and columns, tbl commands also intraline delimiters for fields and to indicate where to draw lines.

First a line starting with .TS, followed by full table options such as center to center the table on a line or box to draw a box around it. Succeeding lines set up the formatting of each cell in the table with one character flags, such as c to center data in its cell, hyphens to draw horizontal rules, vertical bars to draw vertical rules, and carets to span cells vertically.

The last formatting ends a period indicate cell data follows. The data comes next, one line per row, with tabs (by default) separating cells. Finally a line containing just .TE ends the table.

This is just a summary of tbl syntax, which can vary in small details from implementation to implementation.

See Also

The main article is in the troff entry.