Re: Truncating lines in the article buffer

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Thu, 14 Oct 2010 18:24:35 +0200 Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> wrote: 

LMI> Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:
>> Consider using SVG to render the tables.  It's scalable (including the
>> fonts) so the image will look good at any resolution (if the pixel count
>> allows it).  It's really easy to insert PNG and JPEG images too.  See
>> this for some good examples:

LMI> You mean render the entire table as a picture?  No, I don't want that.
LMI> Emacs is about text, and if you can't display the HTML as text, it's not
LMI> Emacs.  (Kill/yank/click links, etc.)

LMI> Besides, Emacs totally, utterly sucks at displaying images, and tables
LMI> used for layout are usually big.  As in, the entire page is inside
LMI> nested tables.

Then you can't render HTML accurately with the current approach.  You're
fighting Emacs at every step: the text layout is hard, you can't flow
around images, displaying images is a pain, etc.

Maybe we're approaching this wrong because we think a table should be
displayed like HTML does.  How about unwrapping tables into lists?  So
this (a 2x2 table with headers H1 and H2):

 H1  H2
[aaa|bbb]
[ccc|ddd]

gets rendered as

* H1
** aaa
** ccc

* H2
** bbb
** ddd

(I've skipped out the obvious nesting example since it's simply a nested
list.)

That gives you a lot more horizontal space and laying out the text even
in nested situations becomes trivial (you always have a full line for
the table cell).  The image-text flow problem is eliminated.

We'll need a keybinding to flip columns/rows I think, but otherwise this
is a pretty good *view* of the table, even if it's not an accurate
*rendering*.  More importantly, it provides something usable right now
and as the Emacs display engine gets improved it can be improved too.

Ted