Re: RFE: Graphical manipulation of table spans

This would be a good thing to do, and would be an obvious case for using
transformations, although I don't think that it can be implemented in the T
language easily. Would it be possible to add an API to an XSLT processor,
and write the transformation as an XSLT (this would be a good thing to do in
general)?

An alternative approach would be to select a few cells in a row or in a
column, and then merge them explicitly.

The big requirement would be a way of selecting a column of
table cells, which requires a different selection mechanism (a visual
method rather than a "logical" method based on the underlying structure).

Whether that should be done via a toggle, like browse/edit mode, or should be
a different selection method (shift-alt-arrow, or right-mouse-drag...) is an
open question that I think is interesting. I think it would be a mistake to
force selection of table items to be visual instead of structural - this
would go against the existing interface conventions of amaya. But imlementing
this visual mode only for tables at first would seem ok.

cheers

Charles

On Wed, 5 Dec 2001, Michael Smith wrote:

  Request for enhancement: Ability to create rowspans and colspans
  graphically.

  The ability in Amaya to create and edit tables graphically is an
  important and powerful feature. AFAIK, it's the only open-source HTML
  editor that provides this capability.

  It'd be even grander if Amaya enabled you to graphically create
  rowspans and colspans. For example, you'd highlight a cell, choose a
  menu command like "Span [or Merge] Cell to left|right|above|below" or
  "Split Cell into rows|columns", and Amaya would generate the rowspan
  and colspan attributes and re-render the table. (Tak Ota's
  table.el[1]-- an ASCII table editor for Emacs -- lets you create spans
  that way, and then generate HTML, CALS, TEI, and Latex source.)

  Or you'd highlight two cells and then choose a menu command like
  "Span [or Merge] Cells" to merge the two cells into one.

  I'm not too familiar with current commercial HTML editing tools, but
  epcEdit, XMetaL, and Arbortext Epic are three XML editors I know that
  provide the ability to graphically edit tables. (I think Morphon may
  have added some table capabilities in its latest beta release, but I
  haven't tried the new version yet, so don't know.) So it'd be great to
  have a similar feature in Amaya.

  Regards,

    --Michael Smith


  [1] http://table.sourceforge.net/





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Charles McCathieNevile    http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  phone: +61 409 134 136
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Received on Thursday, 6 December 2001 09:00:42 UTC