Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Latex Tables

Latex makes things easy if you are working on a large document. Plus, since everything is plain text, I can easily diff, merge, patch etc.. In general, I prefer latex to any WYSIWYG word processor, even though I end up running pdflatex quick often on the source.

However,  there is one item that's a real sour point. Tables. Its just not inituitive enough with Latex. Getting a nice spreadsheet view of things is a real plus point with word processors but with latex that just doesn't fly. You can use table and tabular environments, but they are still quick clumsy.

Assuming that you writing your document with emacs, the ideal scenario would be for a combination of org-tbl-mode and auctex. org-tbl-mode is really cool for tabular representation of data but just does not work with tex.

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1 comment:

carsten said...

Hi,

the combination of Orgtbl and TeX or LaTeX can be made to work just fine, see this example in the Org-mode manual:

http://orgmode.org/manual/A-LaTeX-example.html#A-LaTeX-example


- Carsten