The successor to SpecTab. tabOO is everything that SpecTab had to offer plus more – brand new object-oriented engine, backward compatibility with SpecTab’s macros, more parameters available for style-writers to utilise in custom macros, faster execution, better logging facilities and brand new features, not possible with SpecTab.
SpecTab worked internally using a lot of memory to store everything about each table, column widths, row depths, rules, gutters … in fact, anything that could be extracted from XPP’s knowledge of a table. This was really useful in writing custom macros to use that information, but it cost time to query XPP for all that information. The problem was if you only wanted to draw a custom box around the table, the custom macro didn’t need to know all that information, just the width and depth of the composed table.
tabOO (“tab” from table and “OO” from Object Oriented) works by keeping track of what was requested (table box, or row area, etc) and then only retrieving that information from XPP that it needed to draw those things. This results in fast querying, less memory, faster processing overall.
Available Summer 2026!
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