Subject: RE: Topic: Tables and 1.0
From: Joaquin Cuenca Abela (cuenca@celium.net)
Date: Thu May 03 2001 - 06:57:47 CDT
On 03 May 2001 10:21:49 +0100, Tom Newton wrote:
> My 2p's worth from someone who has taken part in development of a
> wordprocessor (maxwell):
>
> Listen to Eric/Paul! Tables are _really_ hard. If you take a look at
Everybody seems to agree that tables are really hard, and everybody
seems to implement it but us.
OpenOffice has tables, LaTeX has tables (and they has nothing to do with
the Martin hack (a nice hack, btw)), KWord has tables, LyX has tables,
Netscape composer/html editor has tables, Maxwell has tables, Ted has
tables and, of course, Word has tables.
I seriously can think of a single "sort of stuff to compose documents"
that can not deal with tables. And don't say me:
"{kword,netscape,whatever} doesn't has tables support, they only have a
bad hack." They have something that works. Period. In the user mind,
rtf import/export will only be a very little detail compared to the lack
of tables.
So, if instead of using a parental tone (don't take it bad, please ;-)
somebody should start thinking of us as a group of competent
programmers, and point to some links about *HOW* to do tables instead of
just said: "I did it and it's a hell.", I will be grateful, and this
discussion will be far more productive [1].
Eric said <quote>Grafting tables onto a layout engine is a famous,
well-understood way to slow it down by a factor of three.</quote>, so I
deduce that it has to be *something* explaining how to do it in inet. I
can easily find info about how to implement a piece-table (info that has
been very useful to understand how our piece-table works), but I can not
find anything about tables.
So, has anybody a link in his bookmark?
P.S.: No, I'm not saying that I will do it now, I'm saying that it's
more productive to take a look at the algo's that we need to implement.
[1]: that remembers me when everybody was saying: "modeless dialogs are
*hard* to do it in a xp manner... oh, my god, how they are hard... don't
even try it!, it's *HARD*", and Martin did it in a couple of weeks.
-- Joaquín Cuenca Abela cuenca@celium.net
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