Re: format/fill of text in a cell in tables

[Juan Manuel Macías]

Uwe Brauer writes:

> I think, one attempt could be to use org-edit-special, to edit a cell,
> type the text in a temporary buffer, fill it and then return to the table. 
>
> That seems so obvious that I think there might be technical problems,
> because otherwise it would have been implemented already.

I proposed that here the last time a similar discussion came up, but now
I don't think it's a good idea. I believe the root problem is that the
visual representation of the tables in Org is line oriented. Cells with
a lot of content (paragraphs, for example) should be shrunken, because
the content is a single line; when editing each cell in its special
buffer, that content would have to be converted into paragraphs, and
when saving the edition buffer, convert it back to a single line again.
I tried to write something similar for my personal use, but it is very
tricky. Maybe such an implementation would work better for AUCTeX, since
tables in LaTeX are not line oriented.

About a possible solution for Org regarding the topic of 'complex'
tables, I have ended up giving up. I think it is better to create the
complex tables in raw LaTeX. To export them to HTML you could perhaps
think of a LaTeX block that would return the results compiling with
tex4ht (https://ctan.org/pkg/tex4ht?lang=en) instead of LaTeX. But I
don't know if it would work. The point is that anything other than a
simple and clean table (visually speaking) in Org, is to enter the land
of the tricks.

Best regards,

Juan Manuel