Re: Tables in Gemini

sean@conman.org wrote:

 Here's an entry of mine with several tables:
 
       gemini://gemini.conman.org/boston/2024/06/23.2
 
 I'm using a pre-text block to display the table, each row is one line,
each column separated by a TAB.  The first line, starting with "Table:", is
a table description.  The header and footer is separated by a line of
'----'.  Easy to hand write, and even easier to generate.

Not to argue against that being a better format (I like TSV data
too), but if it's supposed to be readable without special handling
by the client already, that isn't working for me. My tab spacing is
set to, I think a fairly typical, eight character width. As such it
looks like the second column heading is "cumulative" and the third
is "seconds", since the column below is most closely aligned with
that word.

 But an even easier format:  I'll make a copy of one of the tables in a
possible Gemini table format:
 
``` Table: port70 (gopher server)???Each sample counts as 0.01 seconds.
*% time *cumulative seconds     *self seconds   *calls  *self seconds   *ms/call        *total ms/call  *name
13.79   0.04    0.04    185781  0.00    0.00    luaV_execute
10.34   0.07    0.03    734588  0.00    0.00    index2value

[snip]

Though the '*' characters now inadvertently make headings clearer
to a human reader, you can see the issue now that tabs in your
table have been converted to eight-character spacing. I'd suggest
that for display in clients that don't understand TSV tables, you
also convert tabs to space-aligned text using your preferred tab
width before posting them.

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