Subject: How to use the new latex style tables.
From: Martin Sevior (msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Tue May 01 2001 - 09:44:34 CDT
HI everyone
Here is a short description of how to build latex style tables.
This is baed on two new features.
1. Tab_bar. These are vertical lines than span the height of a line at a
left justified tab stop.
2. topline and bottomline text decorations. These are lines that run along
the top or bottom of a line of text, field or tab run.
3. Set up a table like this:
A. Click on the top ruler at approximately the positions you want the
vertical lines of you table to go. This creates left-justified tabstops.
B. Open the tab dialog and change these left-tab's to tab_bars. Rember to
press "apply" when you're done.
C. Now press "tab" to populate the tab bars. You will see a set of
vertical lines appear at the tab stops.
D. After the last tab-stop press <shift>-return to insert a line-break. If
you press return, you start a new paragraph and won't be able to adjust
all the tabstops on each line simultanously.
E. Now copy the previous line to the current line and repeat for as many
lines as you want in your table.
F. Now use the topline and bottomline decorations to fill in horizontal
lines whereever you want them. These are available as buttons on the
"extras" toolbar and from the Format menu.
G. If you want to have text that spans more than one column just type it
in across the offending tabstop and it will disappear. Bingo, a
multi-column entry.
H. If you you want to ajust the horizontal spacing of the columns simply
grab the tab stop on the top ruler and drag it to the new position.
I. Of course multi row entries are made by just erasing the horizontal
lines (like turning off underlining).
J. If you want text centered in a column, you have to insert a
center-justified tab in the colum you want. You'll also have to insert
another "tab" in every row with the center tabstop otherwise the table
will look really weird.
K. If people think it worthwhile it would not be too hard to invent a
latex-table editting mode in fv_View. Once in this mode, pressing "return"
in a column would automatically insert another row in the table and move
the cursor down one line. ie It would fake the behaviour of full table
support.
I think these latex-style tables will continue to be useful even after
we get full table support (which allows paragraphs and images in each
defined cell).
I find them easy to use and more intuitive than the MS table editor. Of
course since they're like Latex tables which I know well I may be quite
biased.
I would be very interested to know how MS Word power users like Randy,
find these.
Cheers!
Martin
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