| .TH COL 1 |
| .SH NAME |
| col \- column alignment |
| .SH SYNOPSIS |
| .B col |
| [ |
| .B -bfx |
| ] |
| .SH DESCRIPTION |
| .I Col |
| overlays lines to expunge reverse line feeds |
| (ESC-7) |
| and half line feeds (ESC-9 and ESC-8) |
| as produced by |
| .I nroff |
| for .2C in |
| .IR ms (6) |
| or |
| .IR man (6) |
| and for |
| .IR tbl (1). |
| .I Col |
| is a pure filter. |
| It normally emits only full line feeds; |
| option |
| .B -f |
| (fine) allows half line feeds too. |
| Option |
| .B -b |
| removes backspaces, printing just one of each pile of overstruck |
| characters. |
| .I Col |
| normally converts white space to tabs; |
| option |
| .B -x |
| overrides this feature. |
| Other escaped characters and non-printing characters are ignored. |
| .SH EXAMPLES |
| .TP |
| .L |
| tbl file | nroff -ms | col | p |
| Format some tables for printing on typewriters; |
| use |
| .I col |
| to remove reverse line feeds, and |
| paginate the output. |
| .SH SOURCE |
| .B \*9/src/cmd/col.c |
| .SH SEE ALSO |
| .IR pr (1) |
| .SH BUGS |
| .I Col |
| can't back up more than 128 lines or |
| handle more than 800 characters per line, |
| and understands |
| .L VT |
| (013) as reverse line feed. |
