Support for table column spans, table attributes in AST

[dashed]

I tried looking for this within the Pandoc's docs. None of the flavours of markdown tables support column spanning. I don't think there are known markdown flavours that support column spanning except for multimarkdown.

Are there plans to support this?

[jgm]

+++ Alberto Leal [Oct 16 13 17:35 ]:

I tried looking for this within the Pandoc's docs. None of the flavours of markdown tables support column spanning. I don't think there are known markdown flavours that support column spanning except for multimarkdown.

Are there plans to support this?

Long-term, yes, I'd like to.

[jokogr]

Are there any plans for this? I'm also interested in this.

[jgm]

+++ jokogr [Oct 22 15 08:00 ]:

Are there any plans for this? I'm also interested in this.

Yes, it would be good to do, but it's a big change as it
requires changes in the underlying document model.

[jokogr]

Is there anything I could do to speed this up?

[adius]

+1

[colourwonder]

+1

[brianfeister]

+1

[ousia]

Are there any plans for this? I'm also interested in this.

@jokogr, sorry for my obvious reply: providing a patch may help.

[jgm]

+++ Pablo Rodríguez [Mar 09 16 22:03 ]:

Are there any plans for this? I'm also interested in this.

[1]@jokogr, sorry for my obvious reply: providing a patch may help.

This would require some major architecture change,
including changes in pandoc-types, all readers and writers.

[brianfeister]

@jgm is there any way to achieve this with a two-step process? Compile multimarkdown to an intermediate state and then that result with pandoc?

[jgm]

+++ Brian Feister [Mar 10 16 08:50 ]:

[1]@jgm is there any way to achieve this with a two-step process?
Compile multimarkdown to an intermediate state and then that result
with pandoc?

No, the problem is very simple. Pandoc's internal document
model doesn't allow colspans or rowspans. It's on the list
of things to improve.

[ickc]

Sidenote: probably this issue should be applied the label AST change.

In an attempt to make a suggestion here, I stumbled on issue #3154: pandoc "almost" has a 5th table extension: using native HTML as table. If it were true:

then after the AST changed to allow colspan and rowspan, then before we settled a syntax(es) for them, we can immediately start using it. For example, in md to LaTeX conversion, it can eats the colspan and rowspan and spills the multicolumn and multirow.

The reason for this suggestion is that settling for a syntax(es) is often tricky and requires a lot of discussions (except for possibly "mmd_colspan" since it is already there). But if it only requires the AST change (which is a prerequisite anyway for the new syntax(es) as explained) would make it easier.