[cl-typesetting-devel] Re: [cl-pdf-devel] Cl typesetting and cl-pdfdocumentation creation

[Klaus Weidner]

On Mon, May 17, 2004 at 11:59:28PM +0200, Marc Battyani wrote:
> Klaus Weidner wrote:
> >
> > I think the XHTML to cl-typesetting converter I've been working on would
> > be an option for this. The table support is still a bit rudimentary, but
> > this could be extended fairly easily.
> 
> Tables you said?

It uses the cl-typesetting table engine as a back end, and will need
column widths to be statically defined. Also, it will of course inherit
any breakage. My time situation isn't looking that good either, but I'll
try to look at the problems Erik is having.

This is unlikely to work in a useful way for printing web pages that use
tables for multicolumn document layout or similar purposes, but should at
least be useful for simple cases.

> A format allowing to mix text with the cl-typesetting raw-syntax is a good
> idea.

One problem here is that POD does not directly support tables. 

I'm thinking about stealing (I mean re-using) code from the "table" Emacs
mode, which allows interactive editing of ASCII-delimited tables,
including resizing, cell joining, various justifications, content fill
and other neat features.  It is able to automatically parse such tables
in text input, and print the internal representation in various formats.

Here's an example of a table created in Emacs with just a few keystrokes:

	+-----+-----+-----+
	|h1   | h2  |   h3|
	+-----+-----+-----+
	|a    |  b  |    c|
	|     +-----+-----+
	|x    |    y z    |
	+-----+-----------+

Then, the POD output modes that don't understand tables would just output
the verbatim ASCII table, and those that do could print a proper table
instead.

For more complex tables, the POD code could contain either HTML or
cl-typesetting tables.

-Klaus