[XeTeX] Tables (was: XeTeX in lshort)

[Keith J. Schultz]

HI Mike,

	This problem is not "Tex" specific. 
	It is not easy to get large amounts of information onto a single page or several.
	The problem is more of getting it in a form that is informative and precise without
	leaving something out.
	
	I agree that "TeX" has the advantage it is far easier to get automatically, generated
	information from diverse sources into a document formatted. 

	regards
		Keith.
	
Am 03.10.2010 um 00:29 schrieb 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?