Posted by dorayme on 10/19/07 08:39

In article <ff9opc$9nf$1@newsreader2.netcologne.de>,
Alan Searle <aj_searle@xxxxxxyahoo.com> wrote:

> Bergamot wrote:
> > Post a URL. If you won't make the effort to make a publicly accessible
> > web page, why should we make any effort to help you? There are lots of
> > free places to post test pages so there is no excuse for not having one.
>
> Yes, you're right: It is easy to get free web space. And here is my
> example table ...
>
> http://alse.load4.net/tabletest/table_test02.html
>
> I have set the table width to 300 and each column to 100 but, as you
> will see, because the text in Col02 is too long, it fails to wrap and
> the column is much wider than I want. If I break up the text, then the
> column behaves correctly.
>
> > And put the problem in context, not some bogus Lorem ipsum stuff. If we
> > see the whole picture, we may offer different ways to acheive your goal
> > that you might not have considered. IOW, you may be trying to fix the
> > wrong problem by deciding on a solution (exact column widths) before
> > fully understanding the issues.
>
> Ah, yes, let me expand: I am presenting some big tables of data and so,
> in the header I present the titles followed by a division break and then
> the table below becomes scrollable (with the header/titles always
> displayed). This is great but of course you have to make sure that the
> column widths of the table are exactly the same width as the titles that
> you have declared in the header. Otherwise you have skewed columns
> under the headers which makes it difficult to read.
>
> On most of the reports this works great but, wherever there is a long
> item of text in a particular column, then the whole thing gets distorted.
>
> Any tips would be most welcome.
>
> Regards and thanks,
> Alan Searle.

Your url is not exactly showing the context but never mind, it is
impossible to ask a question. It has never been done correctly
yet on earth.

So you don't like:

css:

td {border 1px solid #000;} /* to show more clearly */


<table>
<tr>
<th>Col01</th>
<th>Col02</th>
<th>Col03</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>aaa</td>
<td>the_rain_in_spain_stays_mainly</td>
<td>ccc</td>
</tr>
</table>

because the unbreakable content of the second cell on the second
row is too big for the width of the column you would like and
would look bad wrapped even if it could wrap. Would you be happy
if *all* the cells were as wide as your widest cell? That would
not be hard to arrange.

--
dorayme

[Back to original message]