On Thu, 15 Jul 2010, Peter Rolf wrote:
also: i can't imagine how a user interface for this should look like.
\setuptables[spanalign=balance]
right. you can implement all kind of different spanning algorithms. i
would expect that 'balance' would share the additional space equally on
all involved columns.
but table macros in tex are really ugly. you need tons of bookkeeping
data for maxima, styles, multi-column|row, whatever. and tex has no data
types for bookkeeping (like a programming language), so you have to
store all the data in macros, dimens... it's a complete mess. have a
look at the macro definitions and you will agree :)
anyhow, i expect much better functionality (e.g. clever spanning
alternatives) with a lua based table implementation. we have to wait for
that.
Also remember that the starttable macros are just a wrapper around TaBlE
macros written by Michael Wichura. I don't know if those have enough hooks
to support a high level interface.
Have you tried using natural tables. Now you can use them with almost the
same amount of typing as the old table macros.
\startTABLE
\NC text 1 \NC text 2 \NC\NR
\NC text 3 \NC text 4 \NC\NR
\stopTABLE
and you have a high level interface of \setupTABLE (although I do not know
if natural tables support equal column widths)
Aditya
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