Tables in Story Entries (any type)

[Stargrove]

I have been creating lots of tables as part of some community development work I am doing for FGU and I have a question about tables in Story entries (any type).

When I create a table with many columns all the cells always are of equal length across the window they are in. I have tried the keyboard short cuts to increase/decrease span (Ctrl- =/-) and the right click menu, but nothing seems to happen with the column I am trying to adjust.

Am I doing something wrong or just misunderstanding what 'span' means?

[LordEntrails]

CTRL+ will only increase the span/width of that individual cell, not the whole column. And think of it as adding weight to the width, because all cell widths are done as a percentage of the total window. This mean sif you have lots of columns, tables won't work well.

Experiment by starting with a table that is 3 columns by 3 rows with a single character in each cell, and then increase the span of one of the cells. You'll then start to get a better feel. And you'll notice that lots of columns don't work well in FG.

Here's the example of the 3x3 with spans increased. Note that you can not decrease a span on a column that has a "weight" of 1.

63801

EDIT: another way to think of it, if you have 20 columns, FG will try to make each column 5% of the window width. Increasing the span of one column means it changes the math from 100%/20 to 100%/21, which equals 4.76%, which if your story window is 100 pixels wide won't make a difference. And if my I'm thinking of this right, you won't see a pixel difference in column width until you get to well over 200 pixel wide window. So you will have to increase the column weight to 5 or 10 to see a difference. And it only gets worse when you have more columns.

[Stargrove]

Thanks for the reply.

Yikes!

I think I will just go with what I am doing.

I don't really have time to create tables by hand in FGU. I use an extension of my own creation to import CSV data to FGU tables that I extract from PDFs using Tabula. When you have eight columns of data (Traveller loves its tables), some with just a single number in them and others with more text it would be nice to be able to shrink/grow columns. I get that it's just HTML that lives in the XML database, but it is not the best at managing tables. If I could just import screenshots of tables from books, that would look a lot nicer, but that probably would not go over well and would increase the size of the modules.

[LordEntrails]

If the tables are rollable, you can make them that way.

[Jiminimonka]

I format the tables like this - the 2nd "column" (and all cells in that column) I expand and that makes the Dice column smaller.

63804

I also have the tables rollable and this way, the tables are automated and they show up in searches in the Book.