[Docutils-develop] Re: CSV Tables: what options to support

[Felix W. <Fel...@gm...>]

David Goodger wrote:

> Felix Wiemann wrote:
>
>> David Goodger wrote:
>>
>>> Rather than counting characters (problematic for very long, wrapped
>>> paragraphs), how about making the default be uniform column widths?
>>> E.g., if there are 4 columns, make each one 25% of the total.
>>
>> But this isn't possible without writer support, is it?  The parser
>> doesn't know anything about the total width.
>
> The parser doesn't know anything about total width for ASCII-art
> tables either.  It just stores the column widths as integers.  The
> writers interpret that how they like.  HTML constructs percentages
> from (100 * colwidth / sum(colwidths)).  I don't know how LaTeX deals
> with column widths, but I'm sure it's not hard.

In fact I was mainly concerned about the LaTeX writer, because AFAICS
(Engelbert, please CMIIW) doesn't use percentages but 'real' widths,
which means that using a width of '25' for four columns in order to make
each column occupy 25% might cause an unsatisfying rendering of the
table in LaTeX output.

Maybe we need a possibility to indicate 'real' percentages (which the
LaTeX writer e.g. could interpret as percentages of \textwidth)?

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