^B and ^C in tbl output

[George Sicherman]

This is a reposting of an article that got lost in the snarl.

Our version (4.1BSD) of tbl produces spurious "delimiter" characters
in the nroff lines for the fields themselves.  Normally these are
control-B's, with control-C's before the first field and after the
last.  This SEEMS to be a bug.  If the fields themselves contain
nroff-recognizable control characters, the delimiters may even be
printable characters, which would certainly mess up a table.

Even the non-printing delimiters undermine some features - try
using the -me special characters in a troffed TBL table.  Chaos!

The obvious fix is, don't write the delimiters!  But then why does
tbl write them in the first place?  If nobody supplies a good answer
within a couple of weeks, I'm going to implement the fix and see
what happens.
			Col. G. L. Sicherman
			...seismo!rochester!rocksvax!sunybcs!colonel