A Modest Definition List Proposal (David E. Wheeler)

[Fletcher T. Penney]

On Feb 25, 2009, at 9:57 AM, Sherwood Botsford wrote:


> I suspect that if you were going to write a lot of tables, you'd write

> a perl program that would take an existing table that you slopped

> together, and would fix the spacing of pipes on all the lines to match

> the pipe spacing on the first line.


Since I write most of my MultiMarkdown documents in TextMate, I (and  
others) have written Bundles that will do just this.  I type out a  
table using the MMD delimiters (|), and the bundle command takes care  
of aligning columns and making it look nice.  Sadly, I suspect that  
plain text tables require either the use of tabs (which vary based on  
the readers application), or fixed whitespace and a monospace font -  
which is tough to manually write.

My thoughts:

+ I am perfectly willing to change the MMD table syntax if a better  
alternative (particularly a standard one) comes along

+ Not everyone uses monospace fonts - as nice as that would be for  
tables, I think it's not reasonable to expect that to be a requirement  
for viewing tables

+ I hope someone out there smarter than me creates a better table syntax


;)


F-

-- 
Fletcher T. Penney
fletcher at fletcherpenney.net

Beauty lies in the hands of the beer holder.
	- Anonymous