Hi Nicolas,

I agree completely with your stated objective, specifically separating
viewing from content and/or export.  However, I am not sure this is
achievable without losing some quite appealing current functionality.

I have two use cases which currently are managed with the width cookies
and I can see that they probably should be managed differently.  The
cases are:

1. a table with wide columns that is used to collect information
   (publications with authors, title, journal, etc. is an example) and
   which I use mostly by looking at it.  That is, I open the document
   and scan down the table or page down or whatever.  I want this table
   displayed initially with columns (e.g. title) narrowed to a specified
   width.

2. a table with many columns, too many of the screen width even if each
   column may only be a few characters wide, but one which I intend to
   be manipulating extensively.  In this case, I may want to
   shrink/narrow/hide columns to make it easier to edit and do
   calculations.

At present, I use width cookies for both.  They work well for use case
1; much less well for use case 2.  For me, these use cases are
orthogonal.  I would be happy with two different approaches or the same
approach so long as the latter would retain the ability to save the view
(for use case 1).

As always, I look forward to whatever you decide to implement!

thanks,
eric

-- 
: Eric S Fraga via Emacs 26.0.50, Org release_9.0.9-573-g09e612