Actually I'm using drawterm, as a sort of remote desktop connection. But I
can't see the problem you are talking about.
The clients (either windows or linux) don't have the font installed, but
still it seem working pretty well (except for the spacing issues in man
pages). I don't have a real monitor attached to the xen server, so I can't
try it without drawterm.

col.c just ignores $tabstop in it's source code. It use a Tabstop = 8
constant instead (and a 7 value to check for position).
Changing the code to use $tabstop is trivial, and I even tried it, but it
neither fixed the initial problem nor decreased the man output size enough
to justify it's proposal.

I'm going to write a sed script to remove the leading margin (but not every
space or tab at the beginning of each line) from nroff output so that (with
my font and my 14inches monitor) I can use a 3 column acme to browse
/sys/src/ && read the code && browse man pages.
This should also reduce the man output size more than col.


Giacomo

2015-03-06 17:33 GMT+01:00 erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>:

> On Fri Mar  6 04:57:18 PST 2015, giacomo@tesio.it wrote:
>
> > if ((++ncp & 7) == 0 && !xflag) {
> >
> > with
> >
> > if ((++ncp & 7) == 0 && !xflag && *(p-2) == ' ') {
>
> that solves it.  you have a problem with $tabstop.  if you've cpu'd
> or ssh'd somewhere, make sure the $tabstop is set properly, and that
> the font you are using is available on the remote host, and $font
> is pointing to it.
>
> - erik
>
>