Re: convert subtree or nested list to table

[Matt Price]

Thanks for the thoughts, Tim.

My preference is generally to work in HTML, and in fact if I had a decent platform to work on I could just use a container class and grid or flex layouts, but the learning management system at my institution strips out most styling information when HTML is uploaded, so I will probably need a real table. 

I odn't think I could really handle doing this in latex. I am a terrible latex user!

On Mon, Jul 5, 2021 at 9:27 PM Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com> wrote:

Matt Price <moptop99@gmail.com> writes:

> I have to write a number of text-heavy documents which need to be delivered as tables with wrapped paragraphs in most cells. Working directly in
> table format is pretty arduous and uncomfortable.  Has anyone ever written a function to accept a list or subtree as input and process it into a table?
>
> If anyone has done something similar, I'd love some tips!

No, have not done that. What formats do you need to export the documents
in?

I ask because if all you need to produce is Latex derived documents
(i.e. PDF, ps etc) and you do plan to write a function yourself to do
this, I would work backwards. Latex tables are not very good for your
use case, but Latex can support what you want to do. Most of the Latex
table packages are not terribly good at formatting tables containing
paragraphs of data. They will typically require lots of hand tweaking to
get the formatting looking right. Getting the right latex package to
support what you need to do will make the function you will need to
write a lot easier. Therefore, I would start with a search of the latex
package archives to find the right package and then write an elisp
function that generates a latex block which formats your subtree using
that package. You probably want something which will format a table with
minipage or similar environments in the cells.

--
Tim Cross