Re: making coloured tables

[Andras Major <andras.g.major@gmail.com>]

Hi Sebastian,

> Andras Major wrote:
>> I'm really intrigued by org-mode's table and spreadsheet functionality
>> and would like to use it for those cases where I found excel and
>> gnumeric impractically cumbersome.
>>
>> What I want are two slightly diffent things:
>>
>> - Make tables that have cells with individual background colours when
>> exported as HTML or PDF.
>>
>> - Make tables that have cells with background colours and typeface
>> details (bold, italic, etc.) based on contents of either the cells
>> themselves or other cells in the table. (Example: mark all negative
>> numerical values of a table with a red background.)
>>
>> Furthermore, the colouring should be portable, i.e. independent of the
>> settings in .emacs.
>
> I add wishes on the above list. Maybe someone will be able to implement
> them,
> if they seem to make sense... So, here's my idea: having some automagic
> style
> (background) applied on the cells to distinguish:
>
> - the input cells (the ones you cannot delete... without troubles): they
> don't
>   have any formula associated with them
>
> - the final result cells: the ones with computed results
>
> - the other ones, whose content is computed, but serves as input to other
>   cells.
>
> Would these be in different colors, I think it would make the reading of
> tables much more efficient. And, as far as I know, this does not exist yet
> in
> tools like Excel -- though people can manually apply such color conventions.

I was thinking along slightly different lines. We have a customizable
<td> tag in HTML export already, but that customization isn't very
flexible. If we could have something like a <td> tag that can be set
from values in the table, or by Lisp code, then I think that would
solve my problems. It's important, however, that setting the export
tag must be local to the Org file so I can set it there instead of the
global .emacs.

  András