*Note October 2006* The code listed below is old. Current newtbl code has been integrated into the dblatex publishing suite

(Note click: here for the (original) code)

Fellow db2latex'ers,

Please find attached my table code for db2latex which I'm releasing under the GPL.

This is a complete rewrite of the table code in XSL.

Notes:

All templates run in the 'newtbl' mode and new and old tables can be freely interchanged. The example XSL file test.xsl uses the new code for all informaltable elements.
Handles row and column spanning, named column starts, missing 'entry' elements
Handles rowsep and colsep with inheritance
Handles rotated cells
Handles horizontal and vertical alignment (within the capabilities of Latex tables)
Doesn't handle 'char' and 'charoff' attributes.
Doesn't support 'entrytbl' (although nested tables will work)
Requires 'calc' and 'multirow' packages. Note I strongly recommend editing multirow.sty and changing \def\@xmultirow... to \long\def\@xmultirow
Handles absolute and relative column widths (i.e. starred columns, including widths of the format '5*+3in')
Uses the 'tabular' environment but can use other packages (e.g. supertabular) by passing the 'tabletype' parameter.
The 'node-set' extension is used extensively. Your XSLT processor must be able to support this extension (most do).
rowseps and colseps are off by default as that seems to be what docbook's tests expect. However this isn't clear in the CALS spec. If in doubt, always give a default rowsep and colsep attribute in the 'tgroup' element.

Problems and differences from the original table code:

Each table cell is effectively set inside a 'parbox'. This means that pretty much anything can be put in a table cell without problems, but it does mean that cell contents will line-wrap. You should always try to set appropriate column widths.
The 'multirow' latex package makes some assumptions about the number of rows it's spanning. This can lead to strange spacing and overlapping cells. There's no easy fix for this that I know of except to use struts in the problem cells. I usually define a processing instruction as follows:

<xsl:template match="processing-instruction('strut')"> <xsl:text>\rule{0pt}{</xsl:text> <xsl:value-of select="."/> <xsl:text>}</xsl:text> </xsl:template>

You can then put <? strut 1.5em ?> or similar to open up problem rows.

Testing:

Tested with xsltproc only (libxml 20619, libxslt 10114 and libexslt 812)
The code passes the 18 'table' and 'informal' table tests with docbook 4.4 with the following caveats:

You will need the use template for 'para' given in test.xsl for informaltable test 017 as the standard db2latex paragraph handling is a bit broken.
informaltable test 015 fails as one of the column widths is given as '4in*' which seems pretty meaningless to me.
table tests 009 and 013 don't work properly as they use 'entrytbl'
table test 016 fails as it uses HTML table tags.

The code works fine with all 1100+ tables listed in the Airbus Flight Crew Operating Manuals (for which they were originally developed)

Best wishes,

David Hedley