Edit in Visual Mode changes the format of tables 🥺

[lilianavalenciar]

Description

Hello there!

Quarto version 1.2.475
macOS Ventura 13.4.1 (c)

I use quarto for work, we have all our documentation in markdown format. I use Edit in Visual Mode to improve the format but mostly for tables. When working with tables, I'm having an issue. The table is in markdown and when I use Edit in Visual Mode and edit the table, this changes the format of the table to what I believe is html 🤯

example

It's extremely annoying and it's very recent. Help!

[mcanouil]

Would you mind sharing a reproducible example?
I currently can't reproduce with a simple table.

Screen.Recording.2023-08-07.at.21.11.56.mov

[mcanouil]

Is it on purpose that the grid is not aligned? (second row in particular)

[lilianavalenciar]

Not at all, I just copy paste. I work mostly on Visual Mode so I don't mind how the raw markdown table looks. I fixed for you ☺️

[mcanouil]

It's not for stylistic consideration, depending on the type of Markdown table, the alignment matters for the table to be properly parsed/displayed.

[cderv]

@mcanouil to be clear, the markdown shared is the one produced by Visual Editor itself for the pipe table. I don't think alignment of | is the issue here as Visual Mode parse table correctly.

[mcanouil]

@cderv I've got that part from #6405 (reply in thread)

I never said it was the issue as pipe table does not require alignment as far as I know, but grid tables do.

I asked to know the context of the creation of the table.

[cderv]

I don't think we document really how visual editor will parse and write tables.

My understanding is that we prefer pipe_tables (https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#extension-pipe_tables) but they have this limitation

The cells of pipe tables cannot contain block elements like paragraphs and lists, and cannot span multiple lines.

In the example you are doing

inside any cell of the table tap enter

this means you are inserting content in cell that is not support by pipe table (which is the syntax initially used in your source document)

In that case, I believe Visual Editor should then consider grid_tables but somehow, the raw HTML is preferred, after a certain number of columns. If you remove one column in the example shared, then you'll have a grid table in the source markdown. I believe this is related to the columns information as mentioned in tbl-colwidth (https://quarto.org/docs/reference/formats/html.html#tables)

The HTML representation is the one that allows to handle width and HTML table are passed anyway, so the resulting document will have the correct table.

It's extremely annoying and it's very recent.

Regarding the recent, note that you are using an old version of Quarto (1.2 and now 1.4 is the latest). The visual editor is part of IDE tooling (from https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto) shared in VSCODE and RSTUDIO IDE. Not sure which one you are using. You should make sure to use a recent version also.

So maybe there is an issue in how the content is detected, but it is possible that for complex wide table, the HTML representation is the only one that insures to get the correct output.

Hope this helps clarify;

Also, for the future, for issues on visual editor, you can open one at https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto

[lilianavalenciar]

Hey there!

Thanks for taking the time for this.

If you check the quarto check I shared, I'm currently using the 1.4 version, although I run into the same issue when I was working with the 1.2.

The HTML representation is the one that allows to handle width and HTML table are passed anyway, so the resulting document will have the correct table.

The problem with this is that after a couple iterations between Visual and Source mode, the content change to something unreadable, let's say.

I work for a company developing Software a Medical Device and all our documentation is written in markdown/quarto. We have several tables and we're able to render tables with list and multiple lines.

All that just to say that we manage to get most of the things we want to do and give you guys the information. We solved our issue with our docs for now.

Cheers!

[cderv]

If you check the quarto check I shared, I'm currently using the 1.4 version, although I run into the same issue when I was working with the 1.2.

Oh I missed that sorry.

All that just to say that we manage to get most of the things we want to do and give you guys the information. We solved our issue with our docs for now.

Thanks a lot for the feedback. We'll pay attention to other report on this behavior and try to check if something is off in the heuristic for writing the right table format in Mardown based on what is added in the visual mode.