[cl-typesetting-devel] Tables with variable column widths

[Edi Weitz]

On Fri, 08 Apr 2005 13:28:37 +0200, Edi Weitz <edi at agharta.de> wrote:

> I admit I haven't done much with CL-PDF and CL-TYPESETTING yet so if
> this is a particularly dumb question or has been discussed before
> feel free to be rude.
>
> I'm trying to create a table where I don't know the width of the
> columns in advance, i.e. I want the table to be "just big enough"
> like in HTML or LaTeX.  I've looked at the table example in
> tables.lisp which uses fixed column sizes.  Am I supposed to
> calculate the sizes myself?  And if so, what are the functions one
> would use to do that?

I've searched the list archives a bit and found a discussion from
about a year ago where the general agreement obviously was that fully
automatic tables are hard to do.  Is that the last word?

Anyway - let's suppose I just want a very simple table: each row as
exactly n columns and I /know/ that the whole table will fit on the
page.  I just want to compute the maximum width for each column in
order to feed it into the table description - how do I do that?

Thanks,
Edi.