Assistance with tables in Sigil

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by RbnJrg

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).

Originally Posted by RbnJrg

That is because if we use tables for Kindle2, Kindle1 won't read them.

Are you telling me something as simple as:

<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!

Originally Posted by Hitch

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?

Originally Posted by Hitch

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.

[Araucaria]

Gosh, a question I know the answer to!

PD is Public Domain - that's to say, out of copyright.

[phossler]

Glad I asked the question -- learning a lot from the discussion

So far, my take away is that (as always) there's many ways to do it, but since the ebook I'm re-formatting for my brother (neither of us are in the business) only has a few simple tables, the css and html approach seems the most practical.

Also the most tedious since you have to get the <th> and <tr> and <td> structures correct.

Since some of his tables are 3x3 and some are 4xN I think they'll 'fit' onto our KT screens.

It'd be nice if Sigil had a 'Table Wizard' to use as a starting point where you could specify the number of rows and columns, then enter the text into a Sigil grid. Let Sigil do the hard work of making the tags and the basic structure for us to customize and polish

Paul

[RbnJrg]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

Are you telling me something as simple as:

<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?

Yes, that is what I tell you Kindle 1 doesn't support tables at all.

[RbnJrg]

Originally Posted by phossler

It'd be nice if Sigil had a 'Table Wizard' to use as a starting point where you could specify the number of rows and columns, then enter the text into a Sigil grid. Let Sigil do the hard work of making the tags and the basic structure for us to customize and polish

Paul

You can use an online HTML table generator:

Quackit:
http://www.quackit.com/html/html_table_generator.cfm

Bagism:
http://www.bagism.com/tablemaker/

And you can style them with:
Tablestyler:
http://tablestyler.com/

CSS-table-generator:
http://www.css-generators.com/css-to...generator.html

Of course, take in count that many css styles won't be supported by ereaders devices.

Regards
Rubén

[Turtle91]

Originally Posted by phossler

It'd be nice if Sigil had a 'Table Wizard' to use as a starting point where you could specify the number of rows and columns, then enter the text into a Sigil grid. Let Sigil do the hard work of making the tags and the basic structure for us to customize and polish

Paul

If you use the "Mark Selected Text" (from Search menu) to highlight the data in each table, then you can use search and replace to quickly format your table with the proper <td><tr> stuff...your reg-fu might be stretched a little, but it is certainly doable and just might be less work than transferring to an online table generator. (I'm not sure - never used online generator).

some possible s/r:
search:<p>
replace:<tr><td>

search:</p>
replace:</td></tr>

Cheers!

[edit]
You can use a clip (clip editor) to put your table tags around the higlighted lines:
Table: <table>\1</table>

then do the search all in one:
search:</p>\s*<p>
replace:</td></tr>\n<tr><td>

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by Araucaria

Gosh, a question I know the answer to!

PD is Public Domain - that's to say, out of copyright.

Ahhh... of course something as easy as that doesn't hit me.

Originally Posted by RbnJrg

Yes, that is what I tell you Kindle 1 doesn't support tables at all.

Calibre or KindleGen... do these try to convert tables to basic text?

Originally Posted by phossler

Since some of his tables are 3x3 and some are 4xN I think they'll 'fit' onto our KT screens.

Should be ok, especially for personal usage. Sometimes you have to keep in mind people who read with HUGE FONT SIZE on a tiny device.... but at that point, sometimes you just have to give up trying to please everyone.

Not like an image of the table would help in that case, the person wouldn't be able to read the tiny font in the image!

Originally Posted by phossler

It'd be nice if Sigil had a 'Table Wizard' to use as a starting point where you could specify the number of rows and columns, then enter the text into a Sigil grid. Let Sigil do the hard work of making the tags and the basic structure for us to customize and polish

Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. I posted it in the Sigil 0.7.3 thread for you as a feature request.

To create tables manually, I sometimes just use LibreOffice Calc. I stick all the info in the cells, and then export as XHTML, and then use Regex to clean up the code.

I also recently used LibreOffice to easily "rotate" an HTML table from horizontal to vertical:

https://help.libreoffice.org/Calc/Ro...es_Transposing

It went from 13x2 to 2x13 (a number for every month + avg).

[phossler]

@Tex2002ans

Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. I posted it in the Sigil 0.7.3 thread for you as a feature request.

thanks

fortunately this was the first time I had a valid (= couldn't think of any other way) reason to try to format some things as tables

The good news is that the data is not very elaborate in terms of number of columns, 3 -4each probably. The number of rows will vary, and the <tr> <td> requirements will require very careful attention.

My table formats would seem to be pretty basic and flexible compared to some of the tools and examples I've seen: no 'client' to please except me and my family. There were some eternal table-making tools suggested that I'll try as a starting point, but keeping all those tags balenced will be my challenge

@Turtle91 -- Ahh good ol' RegEx. I will experiment with that also.

I keep forgetting about 'Mark Selected Text' - many times that would have prevented my over enthusastic use of 'Replace All', and wishing that I have remembered to save a versioning copy first

Paul

[RbnJrg]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

Calibre or KindleGen... do these try to convert tables to basic text?

Calibre or KindleGen convert table code in tables; Kindle 1 doesn't show the tables (shows text in rows separated by one space)but all other Kindle models does.