Hello. I often create spreadsheet in spreadsheet software (gnumeric,
oocalc) and save as Tab-separated value, convert to text format, send it
as plain text in email body. Because I hate to require the other person
to use spreadsheet software if I just want to present a simple table of
less than 5 columns to them.
This way you can imagine I use expand(1) a lot. To expand tab-separated
text table to plain-text-formatted-with-space.
But
1. expand require me to know the column width
2. and each column width must be the same
So this is what I do:
* The widest column I have is column 4.
* The widest cell in column 4 is row 3, it is 12 characters wide.
* expand -t 12
I always want a tool that:
* Check the whole data file, for each column, find the widest cell.
* expand the data file, use widest cell for each column.
* it should know one ideograph counts two characters wide.
question: is there such a tool? Or do I have to write it myself (using
awk)? If I wrote such a tool, I'll call it "expendest", because it
expends according to widest data cells in each column.
Thanks.
Best.
Zhang Weiwu
