Hi,
Apologies in advance for posting several ideas/thought in one post. Here's
a list of them to simply things:
* Use '__' on each line in a spanning cell
* Integrate TableEdit with the core of PmWiki
* Allow for easy conversion of simple table markup to advanced table
markup (which then allows TableEdit to work on the table).
* Extremely simple table markup with custom separator characters.
More details below.
On Mon, 25 Aug 2008, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
||cell text ||==spanning text ||
||text ||
||aaaa ||bbbb ||
There's a small cognitive conflict in that the '==' markup sequence
is used to mean "heading" in many wiki markups, including Creole.
This includes table headings (where PmWiki currently uses ||!heading).
So, I'd prefer a different markup.
The other option I considered is the underscore:
||cell text ||___spanning text ||
||text||
||more||
||aaa ||bbb ||
The '=' didn't seem intuitive to me either, '_' is somewhat better IMO.
It also wasn't obvious until I read the recipe that the number of
equals signs represented the number of rows to span.
Peter suggests _2_ for rowspan='2' rather than the character count.
However, with the |||| precedent, in my view repeating the character is
more consistent with other markup usage. We also have ! repeated for
headings, rather than (say) !3!
I think that I'd personally prefer something like '__2' or '_2_', but I
agree it's inconsistent with how the other markup is generally used.
What about this:
||cell text ||__spanning text ||
||text ||__more spanning text ||
||more ||__last row of spanning text ||
||aaa ||bbb ||
Here you don't specify the number of rows explicitly, but instead place
'__' on each row that's to be included. To me, the advantage is more space
for the spanning text.
Going in a different direction, I've always found tables quite difficult
to work with in PmWiki (no experience with other wikis in this respect).
Perhaps tables really require more of a WYSIWYGI approach? I think the
recipe http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/TableEdit improves this quite
a bit. Note that table edit only works with the (:table:)..-markup.
Speaking of tables, I just had another thought regarding the simple
type of tables we create. The motivation here is that in my experience, I
often end up creating the small/simple tables as follows:
[@
Column A Column B Column C
asdfas asdfasdf asdfasdf
asdfasdf asdfasdfas asdfasdf
asdf as asf asfasd asdfas asd
@]
The reason is that all the '||' clutter the screen, take to much space and
simply takes to long when I just want to do a simple table. So what if
there was a directive that starts some kind of table mode, but with a very
simple markup style inside it. E.g. like this (taking a cue from LaTeX):
(:simpletable separator=";" alignment="llc" :)
Column A ; Column B ; Column C
asfasdf ; asdfasdf ; asdfas
afasdff ;
(:simpletableend:)
The ideas in it:
* Let the user specify a separator that's convenient for this particular
table content
* Specify alignment of columns separately
If you have table data from an external source that's separate by e.g. a
',', you'd then use it as follows:
(:simpletable separator="," alignment="llc" :)
Column A , Column B , Column C
asfasdf , asdfasdf , asdfas
afasdff ,
(:simpletableend:)
Perhaps it might even be possible to use multiple spaces as column
separator, thus allowing:
(:simpletable separator=" " alignment="lcr" :)
Column A Column B Column C
asdfas asdfasdf asdfasdf
asdfasdf asdfasdfas asdfasdf
asdf as asf asfasd asdfas asd
(:simpletableend:)
Or perhaps use a tab character.
regards,
/Christian
--
Christian Ridderström, +46-8-768 39 44 http://www.md.kth.se/~chr
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