| As noted previously, I would not object to adding two more "control
| characters" to Unicode to remove our dependence on C0 and C1
| completely:
|
| 1. UHT "Unicode Horizontal Tab", which is just like C0 HT except
| that
| the tabstops are well-defined (should the tabbing concept be
| carried forward into Unicode Plain Text, rather than using only
| spaces). How to define them is, of course, another question.
My thoughts on this indicate that explicit tab widths are not
appropriate: the only real requirement for plain text is that the
columns line up. So we could have a character
COLUMN SEPARATOR
(CSEP) to go with LINE SEPARATOR (LSEP) and PARAGRAPH SEPARATOR (PSEP).
It should interact with these as follows.
"Within a paragraph that contains a CSEP, each LSEP-delimited
line represents a row of a table. The table has as many columns as the
maximum number of CSEP characters in any line. Each column should be
wide enough to accommodate the longest column-contents in any line in
that column. No inter-column spacing is provided: if there is to be
space between columns, one column or the other must contain explicit
space chatacters."
So the general form of a table would be
PSEP ... CSEP ... CSEP ... LSEP
... CSEP ... LSEP
... CSEP ... CSEP ...
PSEP
An unsophisticated renderer may choose to render CSEP as a tab to
an 8-column tab stop, and this may often give acceptable results.
| Whatever is chosen, let's keep it simple.
This is simple to define, but not to render. Also, it doesn't give
control over left/right/centre justifying each column. If this is
important, I suppose the solution would be a SPACE FILL character, like
\hfil in TeX, which (when occuring in a table, i e, a paragraph with
at least one CSEP character) provides enough space to pad the entry it
appears in to the full width available. This would allow a column to be
right-justified (start all entries with SPACE FILL), centre-justified
(put a SPACE FILL character before and after the entries), or even
justified on a particular character, e g, the decimal point FULL STOP
(break it into 2 columns, by writing CSEP, FULL STOP instead of FULL
STOP, and right-justify the first, left-justify the second).
/|
o o o (_|/
/|
(_/
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