[pmwiki-users] proposed markup for rowspan in simple tables

[Christian Ridderström]

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, john.rankin at affinity.co.nz 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