VisorCentral.com - Can I make tables look pretty in UBB

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Posted by huski on 11-10-1999 02:06 AM:

Hi, being a person who should go home more often, I started a thread in Shipping that was a table of what I could glean from other posts about the status of visor orders. I can't seem to make the columns line up.

Can this be done? Thanks!

Posted by Zippy on 11-10-1999 03:08 AM:

huski,

I think using the CODE tag is the only way to do tables at this time in UBB, so you're on target in your posts. However, it looks like in your second message you were using tabs to line up the columns. I'd recommend that you space out your text to the format you're looking for, and avoid tabs. Here's two examples of that data, the first with tabs (as you entered it), the second using spaces to fill out the blank areas between each column:

code:
WITH TABS
--------------------------------------
kalahari	14-Sep		18-Oct
kaneda		14-Sep		18-Oct
bane		14-Sep		20-Oct
dc		14-Sep		20-Oct
dkantola	14-Sep		20-Oct


WITH SPACES
--------------------------------------
kalahai         14-Sep          18-Oct
kaneda          14-Sep          18-Oct
bane            14-Sep          20-Oct
dc              14-Sep          20-Oct
dkantola        14-Sep          20-Oct

Try writing up your list in a text editor first (or word processor, but use a FIXED font type) to help you get the formatting of the columns right, and remember to avoid tabbing.

Posted by Zippy on 11-10-1999 03:13 AM:

Actually, let me add a little more on tabbing...

It's the differences in the length og the usernames above that is causing a variation of the tabbed formatting. If they were all the same length (which you can force, again, by using spaces), then the tabbing would line up correctly.

Here's a mixed space/tab example, with spaces filling out the character length of the usernames (so they are all the same length), and tabs to line up the columns:

code:
kalahari	14-Sep		18-Oct
kaneda  	14-Sep		18-Oct
bane    	14-Sep		20-Oct
dc      	14-Sep		20-Oct
dkantola	14-Sep		20-Oct

(Gee, can you figure out I've dealt with this space vs tab crap many times before?)

Posted by huski on 11-10-1999 11:33 PM:

Thanks for the replies...I have been transcribing the info from the thread into Excel, which allows me to sort by username or by date, making it easier to find duplicates. That is why the easiest way to deal with it is with tabs...I can cut and paste directly from Excel. I suspect that there is some browser specificity to the way output looks, because on my machine your two examples look the same.

When I edit my posts, Netscape is giving me a fixed width font in the TEXTAREA box, but VC is using whatever proportional font this is for the display.

Posted by Zippy on 11-10-1999 11:56 PM:

I use Internet Explorer at home, which is where I wrote up the previous two posts. In IE, the columns are off in the first 'tab only' list, and align in the following two.

Now looking at it in Netscape from work, I see what you're seeing, which is the columns jagging back and forth. Don't know why, since Netscape is using the fixed font setting for the CODE sections. There's something strange in how it displays the space between columns.

Don't know why. I just use them.

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