How to get a well-formatted table on my kindle

[TheStoepsel]

Hi everyone!

Currently, I am trying to create a mobi-file to use with my kindle that should include a nicely formatted table. What I want to do is:
- horizontally center the table on the "page"
- center the content of each cell of the table
- define table cell's width
- change the background-color of single cells

I found a document in the German amazon-kindle store that contains such a well formatted table. I downloaded a drm-free sample to my kindle and tried to "reengineer" it by converting it to epub using calibre and then trying to figure out what the author did.
When I tried to re-convert the epub to the mobi-format and reviewed it on my kindle all the nice formating was gone! The author somehow managed to achieve ALL of the goals mentioned above. But obviously he took another approach than I did creating the document.

I use Sigil to create the epub and then convert it to mobi using calibre. I tried using css as well as using html-tags right insinde the <table>-tag. Unfortunately this does not give me the results I am shooting for. Any ideas how I might achive my goal??? Should I create a mobi from scratch using Mobipocket Creator?

[susan_cassidy]

Did you try using mobi2html instead of converting first? That might give you more insight into the mobi formatting.

[HarryT]

Tables on Mobi are quirky to say the least. I've found from my own books that, for example, explicitly specifying cell widths will sometimes work and sometimes not, seemingly completely at random. Centring - both of the table as a whole and of cell contents - should certainly work OK.

Best not to use CSS, because Mobi doesn't support it - all that's happening with CSS is that the Mobi creation tool is trying (more or less successfully) to convert it to HTML tag attributes, so it's better to just code the attributes directly.

[TheStoepsel]

Thank you both for your input!

Originally Posted by susan_cassidy

Did you try using mobi2html instead of converting first? That might give you more insight into the mobi formatting.

That was VERY helpful! It gave me a lot of hints and ideas. My tables look much better now! Thank you!!!

[David Kudler]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Tables on Mobi are quirky to say the least. I've found from my own books that, for example, explicitly specifying cell widths will sometimes work and sometimes not, seemingly completely at random. Centring - both of the table as a whole and of cell contents - should certainly work OK.

Best not to use CSS, because Mobi doesn't support it - all that's happening with CSS is that the Mobi creation tool is trying (more or less successfully) to convert it to HTML tag attributes, so it's better to just code the attributes directly.

Do you know, I've spent the last six months pulling out my hair (what's left of it) over this. Thanks!

Now if only the .mobi format could be brought into the 21st century, and recognize style sheets.