Re: draft new tables chapter available for review

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Fri, November 20, 1998 at 10:36:42 (+0100), Pieter J. Kersten wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: draft new tables chapter available for review
>
> On Fri, 20 Nov 1998, Jeff Kingston wrote:
> 
> > I've placed a draft of a new chapter of the User's Guide,
> > to replace the old one on tables, on my ftp site for
> > review:
>
> I'm impressed. I expected lout to be up to the task, but I couldn't
> imagine to see almost all of my wishes fulfilled. Great job! I only hope
> lout 3.13 will be out real soon.

INDEED!  Very impressive.  Looks like complex tables will again be
within the grasp of normal humans (i.e. as opposed to those of us who
can take the time to visualize the meaning of single and double letter
codes and other magic that easily rivals the complexity of sendmail.cf!)

My comments are primarily on the actual documentation itself:

Some of the examples didn't seem to match the example code (particularly
with different font faces that didn't seem to be specified in the
example code).

It would also be nice to see the code for the first example, along with
an explanation of how it works, and what if any issues came up in
integrating mathmatical expressions, text, and so on (just like the
wonderful explanation of centering wide headings on columns).

I also found that in creating the "calendar of events" table I used on
the cover of the newsletter I mentioned previously that none of the
examples in troff tbl documentation, not even that wonderful book about
troff tbl (that I can't remember any details of and is still packed in
one of the boxes in my garage, but I think I posted about it on this
list a long time ago), really covered all the details I needed to design
that table.  I had to dig deep in understanding tbl and do lots of
experimenting to come up with a working solution.  I can make an example
available (and a copy of the troff output as PostScript too)....

I suspect already that I could come up with a working solution using the
new lout tbl much easier than I could with troff tbl....

-- 
                                                        Greg A. Woods

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