[XeTeX] Tables (was: XeTeX in lshort)

[Mike Maxwell]

On 10/2/2010 3:52 PM, Paul Isambert wrote:
> And I'll add: printing a corpus with annotations that don't show up but
> are fed to LuaTeX for statistics, and returned as tables. What I'm doing
> right now.

Interesting.  We're producing grammars.  They're XML (if you want to 
mark structure, use XML!), and they get converted to XeLaTeX for 
typesetting (if you want to typeset, use LaTeX!).  One of the problems 
we've had is that of deciding whether tables are too large to fit on a 
page, and must therefore be printed with longtable instead of floating 
tables.  We've also had a few tables that are too wide, and need to be 
printed in landscape mode.

When we first faced this problem a couple years ago, I was surprised to 
find that there was no automatic way for LaTeX to detect the fact that a 
table was too long or wide to fit on a page.  Fortunately, it's possible 
to tag long or wide tables in XML (DocBook), so the appropriate LaTeX 
table package is used.  But that seems a poor way to do things; when 
somebody might want to print our grammar on a different size paper (A4, 
or maybe a book), they'll have to check each table to see whether it's 
appearing correctly.

Automatically produced tables--which I gather is what you're producing 
from your corpus--might also suffer from that problem; I'm hoping you 
may have come up with a solution.  Or are they all short and narrow 
enough that you know in advance that they'll fit?

(BTW, did you mean they were sent to R for statistics, rather than 
LuaTeX?  Or does LuaTeX allow you to send things to Lua internally?)
-- 
	Mike Maxwell
	maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu
         "A library is the best possible imitation, by human beings,
         of a divine mind, where the whole universe is viewed and
         understood at the same time... we have invented libraries
         because we know that we do not have divine powers, but we
         try to do our best to imitate them." --Umberto Eco