4. Table rendering

The following attributes are either completely ignored or partially supported. All other attributes are supported.

AttributeSupport

table (or informaltable) orient

Ignored.

table (or informaltable) pgwide

Ignored.

colspec colwidth

All forms including "2*" or "3*+1pc" are supported.

Coefficients of "*" are always converted to integers. Examples: "2.5*" is equivalent to "2*". "3.95*+0.5in" is equivalent to "4*+0.5in".

A column must contain at least one cell with a column span equal to 1 for the colwidth attribute to have an effect.

entry rotate

Ignored.

align

Values justify and char are rendered like left.

char

Ignored. See align.

charoff

Ignored. See align.

4.1. HTML tables

DocBook supports HTML tables as well as CALS tables (that is, ``traditional'' DocBook tables) starting from version 4.3. Therefore XMLmind XML Editor also supports both table models. See Appendix A, Table rendering in XMLmind XML Editor - XHTML Support for details.

The only limitation is that mixing both HTML and CALS content models in the same table or informaltable is absolutely not supported by table rendering code and by table editing commands, even if this is allowed according to the DTD V4.3.

Example 1: an informaltable contains tr child elements. In such case, the informaltable is an HTML table. Setting attribute frame to topbot on this informaltable will have absolutely no visual effect.

Example 2: a table has a child tgroup element which itself contains a tbody with row/entry descendants. In such case, the table is a CALS table. Adding a thead having tr/td descendants before the tbody of the tgroup would lead to catastrophic results. Fortunately, the DocBook configuration of XMLmind XML Editor makes it hard to do this unintentionally.