Re: [NTG-context] Feature Request: xtables extensions

On Wed, 8 Mar 2017, Alan Braslau wrote:

On Wed, 8 Mar 2017 16:29:52 +0100 Henri Menke wrote:

...

Natural Tables are quite handy but their syntax is a little verbose.

\bTABLE \bTR \bTD ... \eTD \eTR \eTABLE

There exist nice extensions which make the format less verbose by mapping

\startTABLE \NC ... \NR\NR \stopTABLE

back to the original macros.

The new method for tables, called xtables, is faster and seems to have less problems than Natural Tables. However, the syntax is even more verbose

\startxtable \startxrow \startxcell ... \stopxcell \stopxrow \stopxtable

Can we have similar abbreviations as for Natural Tables?

Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, but I have always found the syntax of the older table macros to be quite unreadable, somewhat a left-over from laTeX-like syntax.

The xtables syntax is verbose, indeed, but much more readable and much better in line with other ConTeXt syntax.

It depends. For numerical tables, the old syntax is easier to read. \startTABLE \NC Parameter \NC value 1 \NC value 2 \NC value 3 \NC \NR \NC 1.0 \NC 3.4 \NC 3.6 \NC 4.2 \NC \NR \NC 1.0 \NC 3.4 \NC 3.6 \NC 4.2 \NC \NR \NC 1.0 \NC 3.4 \NC 3.6 \NC 4.2 \NC \NR \stopTABLE For textual tables, or for generating tables programmatically using CLD, the start-stop syntax is more convenient. Aditya