[XeTeX] table indentation

[Ross Moore]

Hi Michiel,

On 23/11/2009, at 7:07 AM, Michiel Kamermans wrote:

> Hi Ross,
>> It's not clear whether you want all the tables to be indented,  or  
>> not indented.
> Basically, I wanted "indented by any value (allowing 0 if need be),  
> because it is a table indentation properly, not a paragraph  
> indentation", so I took Carsten's suggestion of a new environment,  
> but made it issue a \noindent command, followed by an \hspace 
> {\tabularindent} (with the tabularindent value set in the  
> preamble). That way it ignores paraphing indentation and just  
> always uses the tabular indentation value.

Sure; this should work, and gives you control over how much
the tables are indented.

>
>> Since you seem to be complaining about some non-indented ones, it  
>> would seem that you actually want a consistent indent. What is  
>> happening then is that the first paragraph in a section is  
>> normally not indented, whereas subsequent ones are indented. If  
>> this is relatively rare, why not just use \indent for those few  
>> cases? (It'll serve as an indicator that there really should have  
>> been some text there.)
> The main problem with manual tweaks is that I have a tool chain  
> that does not allow manual tweaking of the source code prior to  
> compilation to PDF - the source gets built of a set of text files  
> hosted online, and turned into (xe)latex source via several  
> scripts. While technically it is possible to detect whether a  
> section has no text in it and goes straight to a table, that  
> wouldn't "unlink" paragraph and tabular indenting, it would only  
> solve that specific instance of a problem related to linked  
> indentation, so the real solution had to involve unlinking the  
> indentation of paragraphs and the indentation of tables. The custom  
> environment unlinks the two nicely.

Yes, this sounds like a decent approach for an automated process.
Do you not find, however, that you get some bad page-breaks?
e.g. a table overfills a page, or just a single row gets put at
the bottom of one page or the top of the next page?
Or there is too much space left behind if a table is shifted to
the next page? Or it indents incorrectly?

There are packages {longtable} and {supertabular} that may help.
These (and others) are designed primarily for very long tables,
that don't fit on a single page. But some of the ideas that they
implement might well be of use in an automated setting.

>
> - Mike


Hope this helps,

	Ross

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Ross Moore                                       ross at maths.mq.edu.au
Mathematics Department                           office: E7A-419
Macquarie University                             tel: +61 (0)2 9850 8955
Sydney, Australia  2109                          fax: +61 (0)2 9850 8114
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