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* "Reference Dump" rant
@ 2017-11-21 16:36 Lawrence Bottorff
  2017-11-21 20:52 ` Tim Cross
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 7+ messages in thread
From: Lawrence Bottorff @ 2017-11-21 16:36 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: emacs-orgmode Mailinglist

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As many might gather from seeing so many of my beginner posts, I'm not
exactly a Sheldon Cooper type, i.e., someone who has the A-ha! angel
standing by 24/7 with her hand on his shoulder. So today I thought I'd
upgrade my knowledge of org-mode tables. So I go to the section of the
"manual" on tables. Experimenting on the commands, I get this fairly
quickly:

| p | q | p implies q |
|---+---+---------------|
| T | T | T                |
| T | F | F                |
| F | T | T                |
| F | F | T                |

which looks perfect in my buffer, but not so good on an HTML export, i.e.,
the third column values seem too crowded to the left. Hence, how does one
justify that last column to be center? Googling, I kept being directed to
this
<http://orgmode.org/manual/Column-width-and-alignment.html#Column-width-and-alignment>
page,
which supposedly tells me how. Long story short, the A-ha! angel smiled,
and in the end I guessed that I'm supposed to do this:

| p | q | p implies q |
|---+---+---------------|
| T | T | T                |
| T | F | F                |
| F | T | T                |
| F | F | T                |
|    |    |<c>              |

which does in fact move the third column contents to the center -- on
export only. But that's not the norm for me, mainly because the explanation
has no example. Sure, it said, *To set the width of a column, one field
anywhere in the column may contain just the string ‘<N>’ where ‘N’ is an
integer specifying the width of the column in characters. *But it's really
not so obvious that you create an extra dummy row and stick <c> in it -- at
least not to me.

I know from math courses that a text passage can be terribly opaque -- *until
you get it -- *then it seemed obvious. However, I can see any beginner with
org-mode getting frustrated often with the Manual. And of course I can site
many similar examples where only the Sheldon types would get it.

I guess I'm saying it would be nice to have a big omnibus O'Reilly-style
tutorial on how to use org-mode. I've hung with org-mode because I think
it's great and, IMHO, should become a standard tool in all
STEM/STEM-education settings. Think of all those high schools (and even
colleges) forcing students to use "graphic calculators." What a waste!

LB

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 7+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2018-04-26 23:35 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 7+ messages (download: mbox.gz follow: Atom feed
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2017-11-21 16:36 "Reference Dump" rant Lawrence Bottorff
2017-11-21 20:52 ` Tim Cross
2017-11-22  1:30   ` Lawrence Bottorff
2017-11-22  2:03     ` Thomas S. Dye
2017-11-22  2:30       ` Lawrence Bottorff
2018-04-26 23:34         ` Bastien
2017-11-22  3:24       ` Eric Abrahamsen

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