DOCX Reader, style handling and tables

[denismaier]

I'm pondering about how I could work with tables in DOCX in a flexible and robust way. For other textual elements you can use custom styles to enable some sort of post-processing or special handling, but how would that work with tables. Is it possible to assign a certain type/style to a table?

To give a bit of context, I will feed the result from pandoc's initial transformation into some sort of post-processing pipeline which will also produce PDFs via ConText and JATS XML. The goal is to put together a workflow where you could go directly from DOCX to these different output formats. I've had some success with initial tests. (I use pandoc to produce temporary html that will then be transformed into publication ready html via xslt, to JATS XML via xslt, and finally to PDF via ConTeXt.) Some parts of this already work, others need further exploration, but currently tables are giving me some headaches... Tables may serve different purposes with different requirements. Some may float, others should stay in place. Some are used for parallel texts. Some have headers, others have no headers. And so on...

In markdown sources I could use divs and spans to make this work, but I don't see how this would work with DOCX. Does anyone know how to deal with these kind of things?

[denismaier]

I've just seen that there's a related issue / feature request: #9603