RE: rectangle operations - narrowing?

["Drew Adams" <drew.adams@oracle.com>]

    there's a package, table.el, which does some stuff that's related,
    though coming from a different direction.  it's concerned with
    rectangular regions that are delineated by particular characters - but
    it provides for things like auto-fill and motion commands that are
    constrained to the bounds of those rectangles.
    
    (i mention this in the hopes that there's some unification of effort
    possible.  i am frustrated by the lack of control of the auto-fill in
    table.el, for instance, and would love to have it and related
    functionality generalized as you're suggesting, to generic emacs
    operations confined to rectangular regions.  it's too hard to get the
    current, specialized operations to do what i need.)
    
Thanks, Ken. I'll take a look at that too.