From: Borsuk E. <ja...@gm...> - 2012-05-30 10:14:14
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Hi Since I learned Docutils, I *like* writting documentation. In recent days, I converted another document into reStructuredText format. It's a Readme file of a mod for a very old game - Master of Magic. The document features LOTS of tables. It turns out Docutils is not very good at fitting text into tables. HTML output is just fine, it reflows as you resize the window. .odt output is more problematic - 9999 in Table of Contents (can't be fixed, I'm afraid) and tables have trouble fitting between margins. But not too bad. The real problem shows up with rst2pdf. Look here: http://wstaw.org/m/2012/05/30/table1.png And this is with manual tweaking - breaking lines manually in 'Specials' column. Note that even though text doesn't fit, there's still abundance of unused room to the right. It's as if rst2pdf doesn't calculate horizontal space correctly. For reference, the reST for the column is here: http://bpaste.net/show/GgQCXJ1LRFSZgcU94VLD/ Without breaking lines manually, it looks like this ! http://wstaw.org/m/2012/05/30/table2.png (reST - http://bpaste.net/show/PnXvwUu6Bfkwx8qvZdYO/) If you want to tinker with the documents, all of them are present in this archive: http://www.sendspace.com/file/t3qv4t They are generated with no extra options like stylesheets. 09b.txt - the reST file with unix newlines. 09b_wind.txt - with Windows newlines. Do you have any tips ? I think I shouldn't have to adjust lines manually. The simplest automatic word wrap would help a lot in 'Specials' column. TeX and LaTeX also have problems with tables, I don't deny it, but at least they break lines and even words (into syllabes!) very well. |
From: Raphael 'k. P. <r.c...@uv...> - 2012-05-30 10:37:37
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Op 30 mei 2012, om 12:14 heeft Borsuk Euroazjatycki het volgende geschreven: > Do you have any tips ? I think I shouldn't have to adjust lines > manually. The simplest automatic word wrap would help a lot in > 'Specials' column. TeX and LaTeX also have problems with tables, I > don't deny it, but at least they break lines and even words (into > syllabes!) very well. I use rst2latex then pdflatex exactly for this reason. Also I like the look and feel of PDFs produced from tex better. :) -- Raphael 'kena' Poss · r.c...@uv... http://staff.science.uva.nl/~poss/ |
From: Borsuk E. <ja...@gm...> - 2012-05-30 10:48:57
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2012/5/30 Raphael 'kena' Poss <r.c...@uv...>: > > Op 30 mei 2012, om 12:14 heeft Borsuk Euroazjatycki het volgende geschreven: > I use rst2latex then pdflatex exactly for this reason. Also I like the look and feel of PDFs produced from tex better. :) In this case, rst2latex + pdflatex output is far from perfect, too ! Look: http://www.sendspace.com/file/le8z7r Unless you know some LaTeX tricks, the table goes so far into the right margin that it makes up for any gains. |
From: Roberto A. <ra...@ne...> - 2012-05-30 11:04:45
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On 05/30/2012 07:14 AM, Borsuk Euroazjatycki wrote: > Hi > > Since I learned Docutils, I *like* writting documentation. > > In recent days, I converted another document into reStructuredText > format. It's a Readme file of a mod for a very old game - Master of > Magic. The document features LOTS of tables. > > It turns out Docutils is not very good at fitting text into tables. > HTML output is just fine, it reflows as you resize the window. .odt > output is more problematic - 9999 in Table of Contents (can't be > fixed, I'm afraid) and tables have trouble fitting between margins. > But not too bad. The real problem shows up with rst2pdf. Look here: This is not a docutils issue, it's strictly a rst2pdf one. Please file a bug at http://code.google.com/p/rst2pdf/issues/list with a (as small as possible) sample file. I suspect this is the same as http://code.google.com/p/rst2pdf/issues/detail?id=445 though (not the original problem with having tables in a blockquote, but just general table brokenness) This used to work a lot better so it's a regression and I can probably debug it more or less easily, but my rst2pdf hacking time is severely limited :-( |
From: Roberto A. <ra...@ne...> - 2012-05-30 12:51:53
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On 05/30/2012 07:14 AM, Borsuk Euroazjatycki wrote: > Hi > > Since I learned Docutils, I *like* writting documentation. > > In recent days, I converted another document into reStructuredText > format. It's a Readme file of a mod for a very old game - Master of > Magic. The document features LOTS of tables. > > It turns out Docutils is not very good at fitting text into tables. > HTML output is just fine, it reflows as you resize the window. .odt > output is more problematic - 9999 in Table of Contents (can't be > fixed, I'm afraid) and tables have trouble fitting between margins. > But not too bad. The real problem shows up with rst2pdf. Look here: > > http://wstaw.org/m/2012/05/30/table1.png > > And this is with manual tweaking - breaking lines manually in > 'Specials' column. Note that even though text doesn't fit, there's > still abundance of unused room to the right. It's as if rst2pdf > doesn't calculate horizontal space correctly. For reference, the reST > for the column is here: > > http://bpaste.net/show/GgQCXJ1LRFSZgcU94VLD/ After some little research I know what's happening here. First thing to keep in mind is that the width of the columns in the restructured text source MATTERS. rst2pdf will try to make columns proportional to that. So, in your original text, the last column is 26 characters wide, out of 104, so it's roughly 25% of the page. The same happens for every column. The other problem, which is what shows in the pdflatex output is that *that table is very very wide!* It's about 96 characters wide, when you count the widest cell on each column. That will work in HTML, where pages can often be 200 characters, but it will *not* work on paper in most cases. Even then, by adjusting the column widths on the sources, you can get better results. Example: http://pastebin.ubuntu.com/1014705/ Which is not perfect, because even the headers are hard to fit in a page, but is improved. |