A.6.1 Radio tables

To define the location of the target table, you first need to create two lines that are comments in the current mode, but contain magic words BEGIN/END RECEIVE ORGTBL for Orgtbl mode to find. Orgtbl mode will insert the translated table between these lines, replacing whatever was there before. For example in C mode where comments are between /* ... */:

/* BEGIN RECEIVE ORGTBL table_name */
/* END RECEIVE ORGTBL table_name */

Just above the source table, we put a special line that tells Orgtbl mode how to translate this table and where to install it. For example:

#+ORGTBL: SEND table_name translation_function arguments...

table_name is the reference name for the table that is also used in the receiver lines. translation_function is the Lisp function that does the translation. Furthermore, the line can contain a list of arguments (alternating key and value) at the end. The arguments will be passed as a property list to the translation function for interpretation. A few standard parameters are already recognized and acted upon before the translation function is called:

:skip N

Skip the first N lines of the table. Hlines do count as separate lines for this parameter!

:skipcols (n1 n2 ...)

List of columns that should be skipped. If the table has a column with calculation marks, that column is automatically discarded as well. Please note that the translator function sees the table after the removal of these columns, the function never knows that there have been additional columns.

:no-escape t

When non-nil, do not escape special characters &%#_^ when exporting the table. The default value is nil.

The one problem remaining is how to keep the source table in the buffer without disturbing the normal workings of the file, for example during compilation of a C file or processing of a LaTeX file. There are a number of different solutions:

• The table could be placed in a block comment if that is supported by the language. For example, in C mode you could wrap the table between ‘/*’ and ‘*/’ lines.
• Sometimes it is possible to put the table after some kind of END statement, for example ‘\bye’ in TeX and ‘\end{document}’ in LaTeX.
• You can just comment the table line-by-line whenever you want to process the file, and uncomment it whenever you need to edit the table. This only sounds tedious—the command M-x orgtbl-toggle-comment RET makes this comment-toggling very easy, in particular if you bind it to a key.