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

[john.rankin at affinity.co.nz]

>> > ||text ||span rows ///||column 3||
>> > ||text || ||column 3||
>> > ||text || ||column 3||
>>
>> Arguably, this is clearer, and pmwiki *should* remove the empty
>> cells when generating HTML. However, I can't do that so easily as
>> a local customisation.
>
> Indeed, the confusion surrounding the "skips" over rowspanned
> cells is part of the reason I never worked too hard to accommodate
> a rowspan markup.
>
> One could potentially come up with a markup that means "skip this
> cell in output", as in:
>
>   ||text ||span rows +++||column 3||
>   ||text ||+++++++++++++||column 3||
>   ||text ||+++++++++++++||column 3||
>
> In this case, PmWiki would simply omit the cells containing
> only ++'s from the HTML output, or otherwise convert those
> into something that is innocuous to XHTML but perhaps useful
> to other conversions such as LaTeX or the like.
>
On its own, this is an attractive idea. The trouble, I think, is that
then simple tables and advanced tables would handle rowspan
differently, unless the same convention was added, e.g. a
(:cellrowspanned:) directive that is transparent to XHTML.

I have cracked the code to translate the simple table rowspan
markup through to LaTeX, and think I can use the same logic
in advanced tables so that they behave less badly. The following
(somewhat pathological) example works correctly:

||aaaa||bbbb||cccc++||
||dddd||eeee||
||Data||Some text++|| A string||
||More||Another string++++||
||Not spanned ||String ||
||Text 1++ ||Text 2 ||
||xxxx||

I'll publish a working example in a day or so.
The above is pretty opaque in wiki markup.

JR