Re: Converted @multitable displays as empty

[Gavin Smith]

On Fri, Aug 23, 2024 at 10:10:54AM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> Please take a look at this node from the Emacs's Flymake manual:
> 
>   
> https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/flymake.html#Mode-line-status
> 
> It displays as (almost) empty.  But the page source reveals that we
> have a <table> there:
> 
>   <p>The following statuses are defined:
>   </p>
>   <table>
>   <tr><td width="25%">[<var>nerrors</var> <var>nwarnings</var> ...]</td><td 
> width="75%">Normal operation. <var>nerrors</var> and <var>nwarnings</var> 
> are, respectively,
>   the total number of errors and warnings found during the last buffer
>   check, for all backends. They may be followed by other totals for
>   other types of diagnostics (see <a href="#Flymake-error-types">Customizing 
> Flymake error types</a>).</td></tr>
>   <tr><td width="25%"><code>Wait</code></td><td width="75%">Some Flymake 
> backends haven&rsquo;t reported since the last time they
>   where questioned.  It is reasonable to assume that this is a temporary
>   delay and Flymake will resume normal operation soon.</td></tr>
>   <tr><td width="25%"><code>!</code></td><td width="75%">All the configured 
> Flymake backends have disabled themselves: Flymake
>   cannot annotate the buffer and action from the user is needed to
>   investigate and remedy the situation (see <a 
> href="#Troubleshooting">Troubleshooting</a>).</td></tr>
>   <tr><td width="25%"><code>?</code></td><td width="75%">There are no 
> applicable Flymake backends for this buffer, thus Flymake
>   cannot annotate it.  To fix this, a user may look to extending Flymake
>   and add a new backend (see <a href="#Extending-Flymake">Extending 
> Flymake</a>).</td></tr>
>   </table>
> 
> For some reason, this table, which AFAICT is the result of converting
> @multitable to HTML, displays as empty in several browsers (Firefox,
> Chrome).  Can you please advise what is wrong with this table and how
> to fix this?

If I open the page in Chromium dev tools and uncheck the
"table { overflow: auto; }" rule then the table appears.  I don't
know why.

Lester Longley posted at

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-emacs/2024-08/msg00983.html

and found that there was a problem earlier in the file where
'<table style="float:left" width="100%">' was output in place
of '<ul class="itemize mark-bullet">'.  This is a bizarre error.

I don't know how texi2any could have produced this.  The only
place that the string "100%" occurs in the Texinfo 6.8 sources
(as that is the version given in comment at the start of the file)
is as

  return "<table width=\"100%\">\n" . $content . "</table>\n";

in HTML.pm, and there is no way for the 'style="float:left"' string
to be inserted.

I suspect there may be some postprocessing of the texi2any output
that produced this error.

I expect to investigate this, you would have to try to simplify the
input that produces the erroneous output.