> > Apparently, heirloom's tbl uses the minimum width of the first
> > column for the whole span.
>
> I agree that this is not optimal, but I wouldn't alter the behavior
> without introducing additional options or such in order to avoid
> unexpected changes in existing documents.
Hmm. While GNU tbl's output is debatable -- it is not documented
whether minimum width values should be used if a text block span
contains at least one column *without* a minimum width -- I think that
heirloom's output is really buggy. Even for a table specification
like
lw(3n) lw(9n) lw(3n)
l s l.
heirloom tbl only applies the first column width to the whole text
block span. This essentially prevents the use of text block spans, so
I doubt that you should take care of `unexpected changes in existing
documents'.
However, you've convinced me to not change GNU tbl's behaviour, so I
will just document it.
Werner
