Table/issue 2868

This finishes up @cherti's original PR at #3055 by rebasing on master and updating to work on master.  I also fixed a few bugs and reformatted the code a bit.  After I submit this PR I'm probably going to rebase again to collapse down some of @cherti's original commits, but will still make sure they get credit.
So just get rid of this branch entirely, and call `self.pformat(max_lines=1)` in all cases?