Table width adjustment by dash character

[swcho]

Hi, I have little idea to determine table column width by dash characters.

For example, if you have next table.

Header 1|Header 2|Header 3|Header 4
:---    |:--:    |--:     |---
Cell 1  |Cell 2  |Cell 3  |Cell 4
*Cell 5*|Cell 6  |Cell 7  |Cell 8

Each column will have 30%, 20%, 20%, 30% width.
The percentage value of width is determined by (row dash count / total dash count) * 100.
So, if you want to have the same column width, you can adjust dash as below

Header 1|Header 2|Header 3|Header 4
:-    |:-:    |-:     |-
Cell 1  |Cell 2  |Cell 3  |Cell 4
*Cell 5*|Cell 6  |Cell 7  |Cell 8

Last but not least, to use this feature you can turn on flag "tableWidth" through options.

I hope this is useful.
Thanks.

[joshbruce]

See #980

[iegik]

Duplicate of #266

[iegik]

I like, that You also see the benefits from this feature.
As already discussed in #266, and my expectations are:

• It should not depends too much on viewport size
• It should not contain additional formatting
• It should narrow sell with big content if column marked as shorter
• It should leave column longer, even if content of cell is short when column marked as longer

The counting dashes, for me is the best solution for calculating relative sizes of columns.
As I see, the Markdown main goal is represent formatted text in text form. So, total dash + spaces should represent approximate table width.
width: 100% - is strongly depends of viewport size, we can avoid using of this, by reverse solution: limiting cell sizes by min-width.
Also notice, that some cell should not be limited - they can be stretched automatically.
Any ideas?

[joshbruce]

Closing as not spec-based (don't believe GFM tables has this functionality). Marking as NFU for possible reconsideration during 2.x development.