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Postings from June 2022
On Mon, 20 Jun 2022 19:21:38 +0100 Neil Bowers <neilb@neilb.org> wrote: > If this progresses further, I think we should enumerate the different > ways/places that people look at pod, and how tables are expected to > work/render in each of those places. E.g. perldoc, metacpan, > perldoc.org, man, and ... ? Hoboy, manpages are fun. Most POD features are fairly simple copies of things in nroff (the backing format behind man). It may not therefore be a surprise to discover that nroff doesn't natively handle tables, any more than POD does. There is however a common preprocessor that takes an extension format and renders it down to simpler positional instructions used to actually draw the table; it is called `tbl`: https://linux.die.net/man/1/tbl Overall, this verymuch is not a markup style I suggest we consider for a possible POD idea. But I'll describe it here, to give a brief insight into the kind of abilities it has. In summary: it's a straaaange format. You write the table contents twice - first in a grid of letters that describe how the cells should be arranged, and then a grid of the actual content, separated by some character (by default a tab, but you can use some printing one instead). For example; here's 3 rows of 3 cells, separated by a pipe symbol .TS tab(|); c c c l l r . Headings|Go|Here then|the|contents of|the|cells .TE Clever use of the cell layout letters allows things like vertical or horizontal spans that cover multiple cells. There's lots of flexibility here, but the overall markup is verymuch not very readable without knowing what's going on. Plus, since the content of each table is just more nroff content string you can still apply all the expected text-level formatting controls and whatnot inside there. Infact about the only thing you can't do is nest a table inside another table. -- Paul "LeoNerd" Evans leonerd@leonerd.org.uk | https://metacpan.org/author/PEVANS http://www.leonerd.org.uk/ | https://www.tindie.com/stores/leonerd/Thread Previous | Thread Next