Help With Tables

[RedHot25]

Ok I am sure that this has been covered here before, but its been a bit since I had the good ole fata so if so bring it on.

Anyways, I have a question. How do you stop tables from always being screwy when you post them? You know, you are discussing the effectiveness of Player X. So you go to TSN let's say to get his stats....and to look like a smartie because you are right (or to be proved you were actually wrong later on in the thread), you copy X's stats and then post it in the thread. It looks all nice before you hit the submit button.

But then you hit submit and it ends up "PlayerX011561" oopsie!

How do I get it to look nice in the first placE?

(and I should have prefaced this by stating that I am not exactly a computer rocket scientist, so the easier/simpler you can explain it to me the better).

Thanks in advance for any help!

[ken0042]

My non-technical method is to set the font to courier; because it is a "true type" font every charachter is the same size, no matter if it's an "i" or a "W"

[getbak]

I don't believe the Forum software currently allows for tables inside of posts, which is why it loses the formatting.

What I usually do is change the font of my post to "Courier New", which is a fixed width font (meaning every character, be it A, I , X or [, is the same width).

Then, to fix spacing, I add in periods between the letters.

That way, instead of:

TEAM GP W L T PTS
VANCOUVER 75 45 23 7 97
MINNESOTA 76 45 24 7 97
CALGARY 75 40 25 10 90
COLORADO 75 39 29 7 85
EDMONTON 76 31 38 7 69

you get:

TEAM........GP..W..L..T..PTS
VANCOUVER...75.45.23..7...97
MINNESOTA...76.45.24..7...97
CALGARY.....75.40.25.10...90
COLORADO....75.39.29..7...85
EDMONTON....76.31.38..7...69

It's not perfect, but it works. If you want to get fancy, change the colour of the periods to white, so they don't show up and add underlining and vertical pipes to make it look more tabular.

TEAM......| GP.|. W.|. L.|. T..|PTS
VANCOUVER.| 75.| 45.| 23.|. 7..|.97
MINNESOTA.| 76.| 45.| 24.|. 7..|.97
CALGARY...| 75.| 40.| 25.| 10..|.90
COLORADO..| 75.| 39.| 29.|. 7..|.85
EDMONTON..| 76.| 31.| 38.|. 7..|.69

[RedHot25]

Thanks Ken and Getbak, you will have hopefully saved me many a fortenight of frustration (whatever the heck a fortenight is? 2 weeks)?

Fotze - I was never around for the good ole board days. Bummer.

[Bobblehead]

Originally Posted by ken0042

My non-technical method is to set the font to courier; because it is a "true type" font every charachter is the same size, no matter if it's an "i" or a "W"

Actually, that is backwards.
Truetype fonts are variable widths.


Put the table between [code][/code] tags.

That will use fixed width fonts and will not screw with the spaces (although the periods thing is a pretty good method as well)