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 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