Hi Jürgen.
First, I wanted to precize that the use of the word "upset" in my previous
mail was a (bad, I know) joke. I should remember that my english is too
bad to play with words.
May be some explanations will help you understand what I mean (Well, I
thought you used to read your LaTeX references during vacations, don't
you ? ;-) ).
By H. alignement, I mean "Horizontal alignement" as defined in the tabular
menu, i.e. right,left or center alignment of a whole column (exceptions
being still treated as multicolumn).
I thought you desactivate this part of the menu because, to fix the width
of a column, you have to use the p{} b{} or m{} specifier instead of
c,l or r.
The package array allows to define both the width of the column and the
(default) horizontal alignment of the cells by using the >{arg} and <{arg}
constructions in the preamble. The >{"arg"} behaves as if you added "arg"
at the beginning of each cell, <{"arg"} does the same but at the end of
the cell (looks a little bit like @{}). For example :
\begin{tabular}
{| >{\centering}m{1cm}|>{\raggedleft}p{2cm}|}
will produce a table with 2 columns, the first one 1 cm wide, centered,
the second one 2 cm wide, left aligned.
> I think we never had this feature had we?
No, as far as I remember.
> Please explain me what this constuct does is there a difference between
> >{p(1cm)} and p(1cm)?
As explained above, the first one is not a column specifier, it will add
the string "p(1cm)" at the beginning of each cell.
>
> > the last column, I decided to used \tabularnewline instead of \\ as
> > rows terminator.
> Why use this if it just gives problems? What do we gain with this?
> I would say "no" to this part in this type of implementation.
Ok, this is an old issue in latex : the \centering etc modifiers redefined
the meaning of \\. So you cannot use them for the last cell of a row, if
the row is terminated by \\, unless you save and restore the meaning of
\\.
An old trick in latex was to define a "preserveBackSlash" command as, e.g.
providecommand{\PBS}[1]{\let\temp=\\#1\let\\=temp}
and to use \PBS{\centering} instead of \centering. (Please, note that I
wrote the line above from the top of my head without checking the syntax).
Now, the array package defines the \tabularnewline command, so it is safer
(and more clear) to use it. Is the reason good enough ?
The problem was that latex2html handles very badly the array package (if
handled at all?), and will failed interpreting the above PBS command
(latex2html is not "fluent" with \let constructions). That's why I added
the
\providecommand{\tabularnewline}.
The problem was not to add this command (this is just ignored in latex),
but to add it in the preamble and not just before each table as I did!
>
> > \centering or \raggedxxx declaration, and is anyway dirty : should be
> > moved to the preamble).
>
> Why do you added this tags? Just set your paragraph alignment correctly
> in a cell with a set width and display and output will be correct!
Yes, but you have to do it cell by cell ! I didnt try to select a
column and call the "paragraph layout" (I used LyX for a long time, so I
didn't notice when it started to work ;-) ), but anyway, if you proceed
like this, you have to remember to do it when you add rows to your
tables. You could also do everything with the special alignment input, but
it is painfull to remember this awfull (latex) syntax. And where there are
buttons to do what I want, I'd like to use them. That's why they are present,
isn't it ? ;-)
> All patches are usefull althought we won´t include all of them in a given
> time. As for now we are in a sort of codefreeze so new feature won´t be
> added to the code until 1.2.0 is out you´re free to have your own modified
> version and submit a patch after the 1.2.0 release so we can add new
> features again.
Fine. Could somebody just give me an hint on how to add something in the
preamble (I think I have to find where the \usepackage{array} is added,
but this involves modifying one more file and I don't want to mess-up this
stuff too much) ?
>
> > - I was unable to find how to obtain a correct display on
> > screen (the text is still left aligned in its box, so left aligned in
> > the cell).
>
> You just didn´t use the paragraph layout which you should use for this
> type of stuff. I understand that it would maybe be better to have this
> as a general option also in the tabular layout but for now it isn´t there
> we can add this later but in a clean way without the need to duplicate
> code.
Ok, I can wait for that.
>
> > - I didn't checked that it was safe for SGML.
>
> Don´t worry we don´t check this too we normaly give more work to José by
> changes to the code, but he likes coding so he´s always happy if he can
> add new stuff, isn´t it #:O)
Hi José, I support Jürgen's motion ;-)
Ho, and you, Jürgen, have fun (I remember you're in vacation).
Alain
--
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