Re: Feature Idea: docx -> HTML table styling

[Noah Malmed <nmalmed-O2gogPphfo5dNrB6XyqITwC/G2K4zDHf@public.gmane.org>]

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Hi Albert!

Thanks for the info! We actually have basically the same use case! 
Definitely will check out transpect!

Thanks,

Noah

On Thursday, June 16, 2022 at 2:21:37 AM UTC-5 Albert Krewinkel wrote:

> Hi Noah,
>
> Just chiming in to report on our experiences with tables in a project
> where we used pandoc to publish journal articles. Our main goal there
> was to publish HTML and PDFs from Docx inputs, with an option to handle
> JATS as well (Project: <https://oa-pub.hos.tuhh.de/en/project/> Journal:
> <https://kommunikation-gesellschaft.de>).
>
> We found that authors writing in Word essentially use tables as a
> graphic and layouting tool. Markdown was used as our central format,
> which worked extremely well: we converted Docx -> Markdown, fixed markup
> when necessary, then published via pandoc. Just tables proved
> problematic. For some tables, we ended up writing separate HTML and PDFs
> by hand. See the "Sonderausgabe | Podcast" in that journal for results.
>
> This is just to say that pandoc may not be the right tool if you aim for
> *fully automatic* conversion of scholarly Docx articles. Maybe tables
> should just be expected to require manual tuning.
>
> I believe that [transpect](https://transpect.github.io) tries to
> preserve more of the styling, maybe it is more in line with what you
> need? Citation support isn't as complete though (last I heard).
>
> Happy to answer questions about any of this.
>
> Cheers,
> Albert
>
>
> Noah Malmed <nma...-O2gogPphfo5dNrB6XyqITwC/G2K4zDHf@public.gmane.org> writes:
>
> > Hello!
> >
> > We use Pandoc often to convert from docx to HTML, and many of the
> > documents we convert include tables. As far as we can tell, almost all
> > of the table styling is lost in the docx reader. Specifically, we care
> > about 5 things:
> >
> > 1. Text justification (left, center, or right)
> >
> > 2. Vertical alignment (top, middle, or bottom)
> >
> > 3. Text indentation
> >
> > 4. Cell shading and text color
> >
> > 5. Table borders
> >
> > We hope to enhance the docx reader so that these stylings get preserved
> > in the AST.
> >
> > Proposed solutions:
> >
> > 1. It seems like text justification already exists in the AST through
> > the Alignment value. It just needs to get implemented in the docx
> > reader, as described in this issue:
> > https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/6316
> >
> > 2. Add the vertical alignment style to attributes as suggested here
> >
> > 3. Add text indentation to attributes in the form of the style
> > padding-left
> >
> > 4. Add cell shading and text color to attributes in the form of the
> > styles background-color and color
> >
> > 5. Add table borders to attributes in the form of the style border
> >
> >
> > Does this sound like a sane and feasible solution? We're pretty
> > motivated and willing to work on these changes, just want to know if
> > they would be the best route!
>
>
> -- 
> Albert Krewinkel
> GPG: 8eed e3e2 e8c5 6f18 81fe e836 388d c0b2 1f63 1124
>

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