A Modest Definition List Proposal (David E. Wheeler)

Fletcher T. Penney fletcher at fletcherpenney.net
Thu Feb 26 06:57:24 EST 2009



On Feb 25, 2009, at 9:57 AM, Sherwood Botsford wrote:


> I suspect that if you were going to write a lot of tables, you'd write

> a perl program that would take an existing table that you slopped

> together, and would fix the spacing of pipes on all the lines to match

> the pipe spacing on the first line.


Since I write most of my MultiMarkdown documents in TextMate, I (and
others) have written Bundles that will do just this. I type out a
table using the MMD delimiters (|), and the bundle command takes care
of aligning columns and making it look nice. Sadly, I suspect that
plain text tables require either the use of tabs (which vary based on
the readers application), or fixed whitespace and a monospace font -
which is tough to manually write.

My thoughts:

+ I am perfectly willing to change the MMD table syntax if a better
alternative (particularly a standard one) comes along

+ Not everyone uses monospace fonts - as nice as that would be for
tables, I think it's not reasonable to expect that to be a requirement
for viewing tables

+ I hope someone out there smarter than me creates a better table syntax


;)


F-

--
Fletcher T. Penney
fletcher at fletcherpenney.net

Beauty lies in the hands of the beer holder.
- Anonymous



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