On Wed, 8 Mar 2017 16:29:52 +0100
Henri Menke
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. (Hans, my only complaint about xtables is that they apparently cannot be used nested in a title={} of \startplacefigure.) Alan