Thread: Assistance with tables in Sigil
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Old 08-04-2013, 07:38 PM   #16
Tex2002ans
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Quote:
Originally Posted by RbnJrg View Post
Tables are not supported in Kindle 1 (nor borders). In Kindle 2 you can have tables with borders and you can apply colors (shade of grays) with the css "background-color" property. But borders you can apply are very limited.
Currently I just have border="1" on all the tables, and apply basic <th> and <td> tags. Mostly because my table CSS knowledge is complete garbage currently (and nearly every book I work on is B&W, so no need to ever do anything fancy in color).

I did not know that the Kindle 1 table situation was so horrible. I have not had any complaints from my employer so far! (And thousands of copies of the ebooks have been sold... I would assume if someone ran into problems we would have gotten complaints by now).

Quote:
Originally Posted by RbnJrg View Post
That is because if we use tables for Kindle2, Kindle1 won't read them.
Are you telling me something as simple as:

Code:
<table>
<tr><td>Position A</td><td>Position B</td></tr>
<tr><td>Position C</td><td>Position D</td></tr>
</table>
Would just be non-existent on a Kindle 1?

This might be where I have to agree with exaltedwombat and just move on. Kindle 1 is dead to me!

Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch View Post
Well, one solution is to simply have the author (assuming we're not talking about PD books which need to stay essentially "as-are") reformat the tables.
May I ask what PD is?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch View Post
I think most bookmakers are deluding themselves about the readability of imaged-tables in e-readers. This isn't directed at you, Charlie, not at all, but in truth, most of them look utter crap on a small-screen device, and zooming them certainly doesn't help.
I agree. I try to HTMLize every single table I run into for:
  • Minimal file size (few lines of HTML is much smaller than an image)
    • This really starts to add up when you have a book with a lot of tables.
  • Scalability (matches the font and font-size the user has chosen)
  • Searchability
  • Allow easy convertibility to a future/other format
  • A tiny image of a table is impossible to scale up without degrading visual quality.
    • Also, in many cases I have run into books where the table image itself is already unreadable.
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