[pmwiki-users] proposed markup for rowspan in simple tables

[Mike Bishop]

On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 03:33:25PM -0500, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 08:03:02AM +1200, john.rankin at affinity.co.nz wrote:
> > > Any possibility somebody could throw out an example of how it would
> > > look spanning a row in an inner column?  Is this how it would look?
> > >
> > > ||text ||span rows ///||column 3||
> > > ||text ||column 3||
> > > ||text ||column 3||
> > 
> > In my tests, it's this one. Otherwise, in HTML you have to track and remove
> > the empty cells being spanned. On the other hand, to generate Wikibook
> > XML, you have to insert empty "placeholder" cells.
> > >
> > > Or would you leave a blank column like this?
> > >
> > > ||text ||span rows ///||column 3||
> > > ||text || ||column 3||
> > > ||text || ||column 3||
> > 
> > Arguably, this is clearer, and pmwiki *should* remove the empty
> > cells when generating HTML. However, I can't do that so easily as
> > a local customisation.
> 
> Indeed, the confusion surrounding the "skips" over rowspanned
> cells is part of the reason I never worked too hard to accommodate
> a rowspan markup.
> 
> One could potentially come up with a markup that means "skip this
> cell in output", as in:
> 
>   ||text ||span rows +++||column 3||
>   ||text ||+++++++++++++||column 3||
>   ||text ||+++++++++++++||column 3||
> 
> In this case, PmWiki would simply omit the cells containing
> only ++'s from the HTML output, or otherwise convert those
> into something that is innocuous to XHTML but perhaps useful 
> to other conversions such as LaTeX or the like.
> 

Probably of academic interest, but troff "tbl" uses \^ to
indicate vertical spanning within the text, or ^ to indicate
spanning in the format lines.

Rgds,
--
Mike Bishop 
Willow, Alaska