Tables in Prototype

[Vincent Hennebert <vh...@gmail.com>]

Hi All,

I realize that I haven’t given any news about my prototype for quite
a while now. This is not entirely due to holidays, unfortunately...

Mixing line- and page-level breaking in paragraphs appeared to be the
easy part. Even if I brought major refactorings to the code since
I started working on it, at least I could come up with something
basically working. Regarding tables, however, I haven’t really managed
to find a satisfying solution yet. I did manage to implement a dirty
hack in the prototype, but it doesn’t even merge columns properly. All
I can think of is either too complex, too slow, too awkward, or even
wrong. That said, I have the gut feeling that I’m not far from the
solution.

So I thought it was time for writing some documentation, and ask the
community for feedback. Having different brains look at it from their
own perspectives may help coming to a solution. At any rate, just
writing doc helps me clarify my ideas in my own head, so it’s not wasted
time.

You will find a presentation of the problem here:
http://people.apache.org/~vhennebert/prototype/
A pdf version is available for those who are allergic to screen-reading:
http://people.apache.org/~vhennebert/prototype/prototype.pdf

There’s more to come, obviously. Comments will be very welcome; given
that it’s often the most naive and stupid question that leads to the
solution, please don’t feel shy ;-)

Thanks,
Vincent

Re: Tables in Prototype

[Vincent Hennebert <vh...@gmail.com>]

I’ve just put the documentation under version control:
http://svn.apache.org/viewvc?view=rev&revision=706297
so that it’s easy to track changes.

Vincent


Vincent Hennebert wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I realize that I haven’t given any news about my prototype for quite
> a while now. This is not entirely due to holidays, unfortunately...
> 
> Mixing line- and page-level breaking in paragraphs appeared to be the
> easy part. Even if I brought major refactorings to the code since
> I started working on it, at least I could come up with something
> basically working. Regarding tables, however, I haven’t really managed
> to find a satisfying solution yet. I did manage to implement a dirty
> hack in the prototype, but it doesn’t even merge columns properly. All
> I can think of is either too complex, too slow, too awkward, or even
> wrong. That said, I have the gut feeling that I’m not far from the
> solution.
> 
> So I thought it was time for writing some documentation, and ask the
> community for feedback. Having different brains look at it from their
> own perspectives may help coming to a solution. At any rate, just
> writing doc helps me clarify my ideas in my own head, so it’s not wasted
> time.
> 
> You will find a presentation of the problem here:
> http://people.apache.org/~vhennebert/prototype/
> A pdf version is available for those who are allergic to screen-reading:
> http://people.apache.org/~vhennebert/prototype/prototype.pdf
> 
> There’s more to come, obviously. Comments will be very welcome; given
> that it’s often the most naive and stupid question that leads to the
> solution, please don’t feel shy ;-)
> 
> Thanks,
> Vincent