[scribus-dev] state of the art of table, from a tester pov

[Gregory Pittman]

On 07/05/2012 06:36 PM, ale rimoldi wrote:

> while i was preparing the talk on scribus 1.6 for the rmll 
> (http://rmll.info), i've gone through the tables and can confirm most 
> of the issues jluc encountered...

Indeed. I was thinking of beginning some documentation on the new Table 
function, but found it so unusable that It isn't worth the bother at 
this time. I would not recommend that anyone try tables out in 1.5.0 at 
this time.

Some elemental things I find:

The cells are only usable for text and in a manual way. You cannot Get 
Text for them, you cannot Ctrl-V to them, only type manually. You cannot 
apply a Paragraph style to an individual cell or to the table as a 
whole. I think at this point having a Table tab in Properties is wasted 
space, since it really doesn't do much of anything, and doesn't avoid 
the need to (mostly) use the context menu. Tables are probably a perfect 
instance of the value of a free-floating dialog for tables.

What is working is applying justification, columns, distances, various 
text features, all manually, and cell-by-cell.

Ideally, I think a cell should function or virtually function like a 
frame, so that you could transfer the contents of a text frame to a 
cell. So that you could tear it apart and have the cells separated from 
each, yet still having table settings and characteristics. So that you 
could convert a cell to an image frame. An alternative might be to 
insert a frame/glue into a cell, so that if you change the dimensions of 
the cell, you change the dimensions of the internal frame. We're 
seemingly a long way off from importing CSV data, let alone an Excel 
file to a table.

There is yet no way to specify the border on individual sides of a cell, 
and seemingly no way to have no border at all if that's what you would 
like. The way that the borders work is possible to figure out but rather 
"esoteric" to be kind.

I can even envision having some way to transform tables with some of the 
Path tools -- individual cells along a path, for example.

The way tables work now, we might actually do better by adding the 
ability to specify the borders of individual sides of all frames, then 
use Scripter to make a tabular arrangement of a number of frames.

Greg