On Mon, Jun 02, 2008 at 10:43:09PM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:
PSPP procedures will write out the bulk of their data output as cases
in tables. In this case, "tables" means in PSPP terms casewriters and
casereaders, analogous to tables in relational databases, not tables
drawn for presentational reasons.
Tables may be accompanied by metadata that annotates rows, columns,
and other properties, analogous to the way that variables can be
annotated with variable labels and value labels. Typically, each
column or row could be annotated with an English description of the
column's purpose, suitable for use in a presentational table.
Three comments:1. One thing the current system can't do is footnotes. The system you describe could do this if it allows a metadatum to be attached to an individual cell. The sub/superscript style should of course be handled by the output engine. 2. More complex tables will need some way of having headings which span more than one row/column. There are two ways that I can see of doing this: a) Some kind of "multicolumn" attribute a la LaTeX or xhtml. b) Allow a table to be used as the contents of a row/column of another table. I prefer the latter. I think it'll be simpler for users. 3. In a few obscure cases, the number of columns in a table is unknown rather late in the procedure (ie after all the data have been read). So I'd rather that the new system didn't require the dimensions of the table to be declared up front. J' -- PGP Public key ID: 1024D/2DE827B3 fingerprint = 8797 A26D 0854 2EAB 0285 A290 8A67 719C 2DE8 27B3 See http://pgp.mit.edu or any PGP keyserver for public key.
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