[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Chris Jones

Thanks…! Your solution works great in Firefox, Google Chrome… and Calibre's epub viewer. "text-overflow:clip" and "white-space:nowrap" did the trick. I just had to add "margin: auto" and "table-layout:fixed" to the class definition for my table to make it sit dead center on the page AND stop the renderer(s) from expanding the columns to fit in more content.

With all due respect, unless you are solely going to sell your ebook on Azardi and Readium, testing in browsers is utterly worthless. I should add, if you mean, built-in ePUB readers, then of course, that helps SOMEWHAT, but still....browser rendering has bupkus to do with what ebook renderers will or won't do. What we can all do with, say, FFePUBReader isn't the same thing as what we can do in Nook, etc.

The only thing I was unable to achieve was getting rid of the (very) thin line of maybe 1px.? of extra space between table rows that appears to be added by default. I could see at a glance (on a ~130 ppi computer screen) that something about the line spacing didn't look right as compared with the line spacing of the ensuing text. Adding a "background-color: #f0f0f0" to my table-cell def's confirmed this.

In order to fix this minor annoyance (and for a number of other reasons…) I tried getting rid of the table definition and its tr/td's and replacing it all with div's but I didn't get anywhere using that approach either.

Obviously the spacing is not the major issue… but all the same I would be curious to learn how one is supposed to address this. May come in handy at some point.

Well, you're assuming that it is addressable. Don't make that assumption, it's far safer.

Now here's the bad news. The two new/experimental "CSS properties" you pointed me to are not recognized by Kobo's crappy renderer (upgraded their software a few weeks ago… so if not state-of-the-art it should be pretty current…)… And it's not just Kobo… I had the same problem with the FBReader app on Android.

So in spite of the excellent help on this forum… I'm pretty much back to where I was… with the added difficulty that it's becoming more & more of a pain finding doc & samples of html 4 and CSS 2 online than it was a few years ago.

Do you know if it's recognized on any of the other desktop readers, either? ADE 2.xx or 4.x?

I could swear I once did something similar (fixed table layout… fixed-width columns… forcing an extra-long line of dots to be truncated so it ends just one space short of the next column… I mean… it's a fairly common presentation that's been used over and over in many contexts for all kinds of purposes…) but that was years ago and try as I may… so far I haven't been able to remember the circumstances.

I take it you don't think you have the original ePUB, in which you did this?

Can you (or anyone following following this thread…) think of a more conservative html/CSS approach that might do what I need (centered fixed-width block and columns with text padded by dots…) AND have a better chance of working on "older" hardware/software…?

No. I can't, anyway. Someone else might.

… keeping in mind that I have my doubts about even the more recent Kobo models and renderer being able to handle correctly new/experimental CSS features… and that for all we know… since there is next to zero demand for this kind of stuff… this may not change for some time to come…?

Using any experimental features is a total crapshoot. There is precisely zero reason to think that they'd work on any existing device. More than half the existing are still back in ADE 2.x era rendering.

Sorry, but...is there NO way you can give up the dot leaders? Aren't they a bit redundant, given you'll be making a linked TOC?

Hitch