bug#71364: Fix Table.el export

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Reuben Thomas <rrt@sc3d.org>
> Date: Sat, 8 Jun 2024 11:05:25 +0100
> Cc: Pranshu <pranshusharma366@gmail.com>, Vladimir Nikishkin 
> <lockywolf@gmail.com>, 
>       71364@debbugs.gnu.org
> 
> Specifically, it works fine if, like me, you do not want to put LaTeX markup 
> in tables. This was certainly my
> case, as I was using it with org-mode. In this case, any character that is 
> active in LaTeX can and should simply
> be escaped on output.
> 
> What is basically broken is the ability to export to LaTeX when the table 
> contains LaTeX markup.

But the function being discussed is said to be specific to export to
LaTeX, so it should expect LaTeX markup in the cells, no?

> Again, taking ispell.el, with which I am much more familiar, what I would 
> like to do there is to strip out all the
> support for LaTeX and mail buffers, and instead require LaTeX- or 
> mail-editing modes to call the
> spell-checking routines. That would require a different approach globally: 
> some of the existing ispell
> commands work on a whole buffer, so they cannot interact with 
> language-specific code. I guess the code was
> originally written like this because it could be created from scratch without 
> changing anything about other
> modes.
> 
> I think this example of ispell.el is relevant to table.el because much the 
> same considerations apply: table.el
> was originally written independent of other code, but that's not a good 
> design for interacting with other
> syntaxes, as you end up implementing half-baked support for them, rather than 
> allowing an editing mode that
> already understands the syntax to interact with the table routines.
> 
> Therefore, I recommend not attempting to improve table.el's LaTeX support, 
> documenting clearly that it
> doesn't support embedded LaTeX, and designing functions that allow table.el 
> to cooperate with other
> packages to export different embedded syntaxes. Otherwise, we will frustrate 
> users (who will find the code
> broken and, if they try to understand it, baffling) and maintainers (who will 
> spend effort for many years
> maintaining code that is half-baked, complicates the modules it lives in, but 
> has to be maintained).

Again, the function being discussed is specific to LaTeX, AFAIU, so
this is unlike the more-general issue of spell-checking an arbitrary
buffer.  It is more like a hypothetical command ispell-latex-buffer
(if it were to exist).  Don't you agree?