Re: complex tables

[Sam Steingold <sds@gnu.org>]

I don't get it.
how does HTML look like?
I don't want to specify the sizes of the cells,
I want the browser to set it.

> * Christian Roth <ebgu@vasvavgl-ybbc.qr> [2005-08-19 21:09:55 +0200]:
>
>>how do I express in docbook (and/or HTML!) a table with misaligned cells?
>>e.g.
>>
>>---------------------------------------------------
>>|    a  |     b    |       c       |      d       |
>>|-------------------------------------------------|
>>|      e     |      f        |     g   |     h    |
>>|-------------------------------------------------|
>>|                       |                         |
>>|                       |           j             |
>>|         i             |                         |
>>|                       |-------------------------|
>>|                       |                         |
>>|-----------------------|            l            |
>>|          k            |                         |
>>---------------------------------------------------
>
> The way we handle this when converting RTF documents to (X)HTML or CALS
> (DocBook) is as follows:
>
> 1. We build an ordered list with all vertical cell borders' absolute
> positions.
> 2. We use column spanning to re-create the original layout on the now
> fine-grained table grid.
>
> In your case, the First and second rows would look like:
>
>>---------------------------------------------------
>>|    a  | b  : b'  |   c     : c'  |d :   d'      |
>>|-------------------------------------------------|
>>|    e  : e' |  f  :  f'     | g   :g' |     h    |
>>|-------------------------------------------------|
>
> with {b, b'} etc. being colspanned. The complete table is then a regular
> grid with columns at these positions:
>
>>|-------------------------------------------------|
>>|       |    |     |         |     |   |          |
>>|-------------------------------------------------|
>
> We have done this in real Java code - don't know if this can be done
> (easily) in pure XSLT.
>
> Best regards
> Christian Roth

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