From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: "Christopher J. White" <orgmode@grierwhite.com>
Subject: Re: Multicolumn
Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2012 17:28:50 -0700
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Hi Erich,

I have a hack for multicolumn support that may help... It's not great, 
but serves my purpose.

I implemented a TWiki mode that uses orgtbl-minor-mode.  TWiki pages 
support multicolumn cells by adding vertical bars with no separators:

Display:

|  Multicol     |
|  C1   |   C2  |

TWiki format:
| Multicol ||
| C1 | C2 |

Notice the double vertical bars after Multicol.  The number of vertical 
bars on every row must be the same.  You can join as many cells as you 
want that way.  I basically wanted to be able to still use 
orgtbl-minor-mode to edit such tables.  So I hacked my 
twiki-import/export code to convert "||" to "| << |" and vice-versa.

So the orgtbl version of the above looks like this in the buffer:

| Multicol | << |
| C1       | C2 |

The down side is that the text "Multicol" will expand the display size 
of C1, so if it gets long, the table grows:

| This is a long multicol cell | << |
| C1                           | C2 |

So it gets me what I want, which is orgtbl editing, and import/export 
support to twiki format.  Seems a similar technique could be backed in 
to any org export engine.

...cj

On 8/28/12 5:10 PM, Neuwirth Erich wrote:
> After some googling it seems that multicolumn support is not yet 
> implemented in org tables.
> I would need multicolumn headers quite urgently,
> but I have not yet found a way to make this possible.
>
> I think that tables with headers like this:
>
> |               |    mean       |         s.e.        |
> | gender | varA | varB |  varA | varB |
>
> are quite common, so I really want to put this feature on the wish list.
> I am not able to implement this myself.
>
> Erich
>
>
>
>