tbl is part of the troff/groff document formatting system. As described by the man page, tbl compiles descriptions of tables embedded within troff input files into commands that are understood by troff. Use this tag for questions related to tbl's grammar or issues using tbl.
From Tbl — A Program to Format Tables†:
Tbl is a document formatting preprocessor for troff or nroff which makes even fairly complex tables easy to specify and enter.
- Introduction.
Tbl turns a simple description of a table into a troff or nroff [3] program (list of commands) that prints the table. It attempts to isolate a portion of a job that it can successfully handle and leave the remainder for other programs. Thus tbl may be used with the equation formatting program eqn [2] or various layout macro packages [1], [5], [6], but does not duplicate their functions.
tbl is a part of a set of tools that were developed by AT&T for typesetters. These include:
- groff/troff/nroff: a Unix text-formatting program
- pic: compile pictures for troff or TeX
- eqn: format equations for troff
- chem: chemical structure diagrams
References:
