I am trying to generate a lyx document from a script, and came across lyx which seemed like a perfect fit because the ASCII syntax made it simple to write a script that could generate a pretty-printable document. However, I am being hampered by a lack of automatic table cell wrapping (that, and I last used latex 20 years ago, so creating a layout is more of a hassle than I would prefer). From what I have been able to discover from the web, latex will only wrap table cells if a fixed width has first been specified by the user. This seems wrong, since no one would want a table to extend past the page margin.
Not knowing the internals of either latex or lyx, I was wondering why a simple algorithm of selecting the optimal layout amongst those that had the minimal row count wasn't implemented? The implementation itself seems fairly straightforward as one could consider each column in isolation to compute those critical widths at which the row count was affected, and then combine the columns to determine the optimal widths.
Steve Friedman
