Comment by 🚬 sy
Re: "Gemtext Tables, No HTML Required"
@manat It’s not viable to always come up with a single-line alt–text that is a real ‘alternative’ text for the actual content. And there many uses of longer text in tabular data. E.g. for a “table” that compares the remnant sentences of same ancient text that survived through two (or more) different sources/languages.
Apr 27 · 10 days ago
3 Later Comments ↓
Oh, I forgot about the text on the same line as ```..
Hi, you could check out this entry on my gemlog, about a utility for creating tables using a bash script.
— Table Generator MD to Ascii/Unicode
🚀 SavaRocks [OP] · Apr 28 at 05:07:
@Caleb and I made all those tables with the box drawing characters from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box-drawing_characters
Will give your script a try
Original Post
Gemtext Tables, No HTML Required — If you spend any time writing in Gemtext, you quickly run into a familiar limitation: there are no native tables. That's part of the charm - Gemtext is intentionally minimal - but it also means that anything resembling structured data needs a bit of creativity. One surprisingly effective workaround is to lean on Unicode box-drawing characters. The result isn't just functional - it's pleasantly retro, highly portable, and fits perfectly within the constraints…