Poor table formatting

[pekkavaa]

Consider this table in djot:

|System|Graphics chip|Release year|Palette colors|Palette format|
|-|-|-|-|-|
|PlayStation|Sony CXD8561Q|1994|16, 256|ARGB1555|
|Nintendo 64|SGI Reality Display Processor|1996|16, 256|ARGB1555|
|PC|3dfx Voodoo 2|1998|256| ARGB1555, RGB565 and others|

Expected result: A tightly packed but properly formatted table.

The actual result:

[Omikhleia]

Greetings,
For the sake of reproducing and explaining, which paper size and options did you use?

For instance, I tried with:

sile -u inputters.djot temp/table.dj -c resilient.book -O papersize=a5

(so A5 paper, resilient.book class defaults, i.e. page layout "division" and font Gentium 10pt)

Which does indeed show some similarity:

Notes on what we can observe:

• (1) in "default" alignment, we have the paragraph indent (which might or might not be what one expects).
• (2) in "default" alignment, the text is justified according to the contraints - which may lead to extend beyond the cell even in case of multiple words ("Sony CXD8561Q"). Would you really want to use justified text here, that's a usual consequence of the more-or-less default settings of the TeX-derived line breaking strategy. Several parameters at low level exist to tune it.
• (3) Shows both (1) and (2): A single word with no obvious hyphenation break-point, and it is too long (incl. the paragraph indent) to fit in the cell.

Chaging the second table line (alignments) to |:-|:-|:-|:-|:-| would give:

(This being said, the current solution uses cells of equal width. There was some discussion on making this more configurable and/or automated; but I never found the time to consider them more thoughtfully.)

[pekkavaa]

Thank you for the quick reply. From my .silm file:

font:
  family: Nimbus Roman
  size: 10pt
language: en
book:
  enabled: true
sile:
  options:
    papersize: 6in x 9in
    layout: division 9
    resolution: 300
  settings:
    textsubsuper.fake: true
    autodoc.highlighting: true
    typesetter.italicCorrection: true # Available in SILE 0.15 (comment out for earlier versions)
    math.font.filename: fonts/LibertinusMath-Regular.otf
  packages:
    - autodoc-resilient # REQUIRED FOR RESILIENT, do not use regular autodoc
    - techbook # my custom package that defines just a "todo" command.

The default text alignment is a good point. I think |:-|:-|:-|:-|:-| solves my immediate issue for now.

Eventually, I think I'd like to do some custom styling of the tables though. How would you recommend doing this? Writing Lua or forking the markdown.sile package for hacking are not a problem.

[Omikhleia]

Eventually, I think I'd like to do some custom styling of the tables though. How would you recommend doing this? Writing Lua or forking the markdown.sile package for hacking are not a problem.

The very first step? Writing a specification on what to express, and how :)

(Totally aside note: in your master document, you probably do not need the autodoc.highlighting setting and the autodoc-resilient package -- unless you plan to include SILE package documentation in your project, that is).

[pekkavaa]

Writing a specification on what to express, and how :)

I'd like to control the table border colors and line widths, padding, and header row font style.

you probably do not need the autodoc.highlighting setting and the autodoc-resilient package

Thanks!