On Tue, Jul 11, 2017 at 8:26 AM Nicolas Goaziou <m...@nicolasgoaziou.fr>
wrote:

>
> I don't use column narrowing; I don't know what other users expect from
> it either.
>

I use column narrowing when I need to fit all columns of an org table in a
screen width (roughly 100 chars wide).

If I have a column called "Description" that can have 100's of characters
in a cell, I'd like to not push the other columns to the right outside the
screen.

- Having line truncation on hides the columns that go beyond the screen
width
- Disabling line truncation makes org tables difficult to read
- So the column width cookie is the best thing we have at the moment

[image: image.png]
The latter table without truncation enabled:
[image: image.png]

Are there some rules to decide what would be an acceptable narrowing
> (e.g., narrow columns larger than 10 characters by half or to 20
> characters, whichever is the smaller) or do users really need to decide
> piece-wise the number of characters needed?


In my use case above, I would do the narrowing just enough to have the
tables fit in my usual window widths.


> If the latter, would
> a numeric argument for the narrowing command be sufficient?


If the column widths do not get saved, it would get tedious to repeat those
narrowing steps each time the same Org file is opened.

Note that in
> this case, it may not be possible to narrow multiple columns at a time.
>

Narrowing multiple columns would be a necessity. That, plus doing so
automatically when an Org file is opened. See above screenshots to see my
typical use of column width cookies.


> Also, do we need to commands for that, or would cycling between
> expanded/narrowed by some factor (see above)/shrunk states be
> sufficient?


I typically just set it and forget it. If I need to remove the widening, I
comment out the "#+STARTUP: align" line and do revert-buffer.


> IOW, let's discuss about specifications.
>

1. Need to save the column narrowed state somehow individually for each
column, specific to a table in a document.
2. Alternative: Look at the window width and calculate the factor by which
all columns should be narrowed so that the whole table fits the window
(Sounds very complicated).
-- 

Kaushal Modi

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