Re: lynx-dev table formatting (possible) solution

[Vlad Harchev]

On Mon, 7 Jun 1999 address@hidden wrote:

> > 
> > > From: thi <address@hidden> 
> >  
> > > correct.  probably the original poster meant borrowing algorithms rather 
> > > than code.  (although having lynx integrated into emacs would be nice.) 
> >  
> > Indeed -- the point of Fote's message seemed to be that TABLE text 
> > formatting is ugly and complicated, but someone's clearly gone to the 
> > effort 
> > of doing this with w3 already, so why not see if the algorithms can be 
> > dup'd?  elisp in lynx is not really something useful IMHO... 
> 
> it's not that it is ugly and complicated, but that lynx is designed as
> a one-pass renderer, while tables require look-ahead.  changing that isn't
> simple.

 May be one of the solutions can be the following:
lynx should still generate one-pass representation of the table as it does
now (with aggregating table data in some internal structures in order to use
these structures later for pretty drawing), but provide a link near each table
with text like
  "pretty view of this table".
When user dereferencs link, the nice table rendering is displayed (only the
rendering of this table, nothing else). IMO this rendered version can be
arbitrary wider than screen (may be we can use curses' pads for scrolling - 
they are very useful for this) - if so, then table can be indeed pretty 
rendered since no width coonstraint remains.
 
> -- 
> Thomas E. Dickey
> address@hidden
> http://www.clark.net/pub/dickey
> 

 Best regards,
  -Vlad