Re: Enhancing table cell alignments and commenting columns (was Re: Orthogonality of blocks)

[Jambunathan K <kjambunathan@gmail.com>]

> I think the colcookie lines could be enhnaced to also support "t" and
> "/" characters. IMNSHO, using #+ATTR_ODT: lines for commenting out
> columns will not only be cumbersome but also error-prone.

A random thought:

I think there will be more flexibility if the colcookies characters -
"l" and "r" - were actually style strings (of length > 1). The backend
can use their own discretion on how they "apply" these styles.

There was some interest to mark certain columns specially - for example,
mark automatically computed derived columns specially (both in Org and
may be in the different backends). The colcookie could line could be put
to some use here. (Question: Is there a way to fontify a rectangle in
Emacs?)

On a related note:

From ODT perspective and taking a cue from the way LibreOffice does
autoformatting of tables, I was thinking of introducing "template
tables" whose only job is to specify the styles to be associated with
each of the different categories of table cells.

OpenDocument talks of following types of columns and LibreOffice's
autoformatting is much richer and recognizes, I believe, as much as 16
categories of table cells.

,---- C-h v org-export-odt-table-styles
| TABLE-CELL-TYPE       := "FirstRow"   | "LastColumn" |
|                          "FirstRow"   | "LastRow"    |
|                          "EvenRow"    | "OddRow"     |
|                          "EvenColumn" | "OddColumn"  | ""
| 
`----

#+ATTR_ODT: template-table
| red | green | yellow |
|-----+-------+--------|
|     |       |        |

ps: I don't have time to implement the above features. I am just
capturing my thoughts so that it is archived.

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