I would invite commentary on the document I'm working up in 3100 to be posted here rather than there.  I will move comments from there here to keep that topic clean and organized, as it will serve as a base for further publication of the data.

Thank you all for your co-operation and understanding.

Suggestion: You've stated that the smallest grid squares can accommodate 2 characters without distortion. It would be interesting to know the character limit of the other four standard grid sizes, rather than leaving it to user experimentation. That way, we can see at a glance which size grid to use for the information we want to present.

In reply to Dabbler (msg # 2):

You are entirely right.  I start a much needed vacation when I get home Friday morning, and will do as you have suggested.  I'm wondering, though, if this is dependent on screen resolution, (I have two:  a 1600 X 900 flat panel above my laptop's 1920 X 1080 display, so I should be able to figure that out for certain soon enough.)

The entire topic of how text strings that are too long distorts squares in a grid is also worth more detailed treatment.  (That may lead to further development of the grid markup language... ya never know.)

I gotta run to work, but will definitely get on this when I get time this week.  I hope to finish this and two other writing projects while I'm off.

(I'm revising the Rules of Play in preparation for kicking my Firefly campaign off again, and writing a System Reference Document for my d6 Anime' system - I've already used it to create one anime-related game that is in playtest now across a table so, since my first round of testing uncovered some work needed, I thought the SRD would be a good place to start.)

Gotta run!

Thanks for this. I've had no end of trouble with distorted tables, and no explanation in the Rpol FAQ regarding the role of pipes in the code.

That particular bit of kit was hard-won.  I'm not entirely sure it is correct in all cases, but it's gotta be pretty close for most.  Thank you.

Incidentally, jase does a decent job of explaining the role of the various symbols at the very beginning of the Help topic on Easy Tables.  All I did was experimentally verify it was correct, then re-phrase what he said a bit to help make it clearer.

"If I have seen farther than others it is because I have stood upon the shoulders of giants." -- Sir Isaac Newton
This message was last edited by the GM at 09:25, Sun 28 Apr 2019.

Wow you have been busy !  :>  Just about to work my way through the thread, but while we're on the topic ...

If it helps, it seems you can use the ISO Entity | to generate the pipe symbol without interfering with the Easy Tables code.  :>

In reply to Skald (msg # 6):

Ooh... show me an example of what you mean with &124, please.

Erk.  You show "&#124".  Yeah, I'm not seeing what I could do with it right now. (Probably too close to the situation...)

Thanks,
D

Oh, I don't know why anyone would want to put a pipe symbol in a table, but there's always someone.  <grins>

And like this:

| A | B |
| C | &#124; |

And ... wow !  You have been a) busy and b) thorough !   I'm still working through all the examples, but a couple of comments lest I forget:

A) I have managed (by a lot of trial and error) to get the last column to span a row - the trick will be to work out the rule and then to explain it simply !

|!! Column A | Column B    | Column C   | Column D      |60%
|1.3^ Cell 1 | Cell 2      |1.2^ Cell 3 |1.3 Cell 4
             | Cell 2-2
                           | Cell 3-3


My take ...

1) always omit the left pipe border on any spanned row except the first
2) omit the right hand border on all rows except than the header


B) Something I noticed while looking at your sample tables and playing with the above that I don't think is covered (or at least I haven't found it yet) ... the contents of the cells influence the column width if you don't specify a fixed width value.  Compare the two tables below - the first has 2 characters in each column and both columns are equal width, the second has 2 characters in the first column and 4 characters in the second column and the second column is roughly (doesn't look exactly, but that might be due to non-proportional fonts) twice the width of the first column.

| 2| 2|10%
|--|--|


| 2| 444|10%
|--|----|


The implication is that if you want to have equal sized columns regardless of content you need to specify the column width percentage:

|50% 2|50% 444|10%
|--|----|


Except as the instructions already note, too much text will override the width setting

|50% 2|50% 123456789|10%
|--|----|

Other work by Escribblings seems to bear out these findings. Your example, however, troubles me for one of the same reasons mine did:  there is an empty cell that shouldn't be there...  Your example also omits the previous span done on Cell 2.2.  Compare below with my previous example, please.  (Note how Cell 3-3 gets moved to the left somehow, also...)


Escribblings submitted this code:

|!! A      | B  | C        | D
|1.4= A1-4 | B1 | C1       | D1
           | B2 |1.2= C2-3 | D2
           | B3            |1.2= D3-4
           | B4 | C4


Which looks like it does what he intended it to do.  Paring down all those right-hand pipes seems to be the way to go from what you and he have shown us here.

Admittedly, the example I chose is a complex one, and one not likely to occur except that I'm thinking of trying to simulate an offset grid in this manner (to simulate, in turn, a hex map) as an example of "advanced table coding" in a later topic in this tutorial.



I touch on this, but I'm not sure I formulated it as a general rule.  I'll have to go back and look at what I've written to be sure.  I wonder if I should work that in where I introduce W% formatting for column widths.

I will keep working this "offline" when I have opportunity.  Right now, I'm focused more on getting the rest of the advanced stuff out there in the first draft, then doing all the cleanup.

I am so pleased you like what you are seeing so far - it means I'm doing something that will be useful to the community.

Aha - my bad, I left cell 2-3 in limbo - it wasn't defined at all (neither as a spanned row or column), so no wonder it put Cell 3-3 in the wrong place.  This works - just needed the extra "| Cell 2-3   " in there:

|!! Column A  | Column B    | Column C    | Column D      |60%
|=1.3^ Cell 1 | Cell 2      |=1.2^ Cell 3 |1.3 Cell 4
              | Cell 2-2
              | Cell 2-3    | Cell 3-3


And from there it's a simple matter to span Cells 2-3 and 3-3 together:

|!! Column A  | Column B    | Column C    | Column D      |60%
|=1.3^ Cell 1 | Cell 2      |=1.2^ Cell 3 |1.3 Cell 4
              | Cell 2-2
              |2.1^ Cell 2-3 & Cell 3-3


Missing out the table far right hand pipes does seem to be the first thing to ditch to get this all to work - I understand dropping the left hand pipes for spanned rows, but dropping the right hand pipe isn't intuitive.

---

And oh yes, push on with the advanced stuff, the rest of it is just tweaking.  :>

---

I did experiment a bit and it looks like I can edit the FAQ and it does seem to handle the syntax for easy tables, and it also does those 'mouse click to expand/shrink sections' thingies, so what looks like an awful lot of separate thread topics here I'll be able to display quite nicely (user just needs to click on the heading to view the detail) - fingers crossed - I haven't actually tested that cos any changes I make go live immediately.

Currently the help topic for RuBB Code has a link to Easy tables under the Tables heading - my plan is to remove that reference, relabel the existing info as HTML Tables - basics and then add a new heading Easy Tables and Grids to that with as little info as I can get away with to go with the relocated link to the Easy Tables page where we'll put all this hard won knowledge.  At least that's the plan. <grins>

Hmm, I'm very much the junior partner here. I use simple tables sometimes, but I doubt if I can contribute much beyond questions and feedback to pre-empt user queries.
So...
Is there a list of Character Entities?

<grins> I unfortunately have had some experience with easy tables ... but don't have the time to do the full court press on them that Chief Tinker is currently bravely undertaking - I did put my hand up to double check and to upload it to the RPoL Help pages once we get it sorted, though, hence my belated entry into the fray.

Ah, the good old Character/ISO Entities ... here's one we prepared earlier link to a message in another game.  Yes, that should probably go in the RPoL Help too.  So little to do, so much time ... scratch that, reverse it. ;>

Hey, every contribution to the effort is worthwhile, man.  If you read something and it isn't clear or hits you the wrong way, I need to know.

As for Character Entities, I found a good list in the O'Reilly book Web Design in a Nutshell by Jennifer Niederst.  My copy is dog-eared and marked up from my old HTML 4.0 days.

An excellent online list of character entities can be found at:

Character Entities Cheat Sheet

Additionally, there is a Wikipedia article that goes into some rigorous detail at:

List of XML and HTML Character Entities

but is neither very concise nor as well organized as the previous resource.

Ack!  I just glommed onto the concept that character entities should include a semicolon at the end no matter which format (name or numeric) is used!  I'll have to correct that...

(I do note, however, that named character entities seem to work fine without them.  That said, let's not descend into that kind of sloppiness here.)

About the Divergence:

I have a copy of this tutorial that is rather better organized in Technical Discussions:

I do intend, when I get time, to update the HT version to this standard.  Things got away from me the other night while I was working on the re-org and I ran out of time.

Yeah, the game plan is to merge both to be as close to identical (except the introductory post, which varies a bit because of the differences in location...)

I eventually intend to use the copy here at HT for maintenance purposes as we discover new and better ways to use Easy Tables and Grids.

Is Character Entities the same as ISO Entities ?  I only ask as jase has previously said ISO Entities were supported, and it looks like Character Entities is a rather large extension on that set.  Though I'm blissfully ignorant on the matter and they may very well be one and the same.  :>

The more I dig on this subject, the more it seems to be related to HTML and XML.  Short answer:  it probably depends.

Since what we use here for formatting is a variant/subset of HTML mixed with BBCode (specifically RuBB Code), jase (or any moderator with access to the source code) would have to be the authority concerning what is and is not supported.

Whether we are supporting ISO, UTF, or what could change as time marches on.  HTML 4.0, for example, supports UTF-8 by default, where HTML 5 supports both UTF-8 and UTF-16.

In all honesty, after a quick search of the WWW I'm still not sure.  I know that ISO defines code pages supporting different languages, and that the Unicode Consortium defines a character set that may have multiple bytes representing one character as a sort of "one ring to rule them all" (and that's a gross oversimplification by way of metaphor)

There's a decent article at:  https://www.ahuka.com/?page_id=121

A more rigorous discussion encompassing all character sets in use in HTML is at:  https://www.w3schools.com/charsets/default.asp

It pertains mainly to HTML, and makes mention of code page selection at the head of an HTML document.  This selection line takes the form:

<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1&#8243;>

That charset= parameter defines the character set as ISO 8859-1 (Western Europe aka Latin1 and several other aliases exist, muddying the waters further.)

If, indeed, we are using ISO 8859-1 encoding for RPoL, then the character entities we would have to use would be drawn from that set.

If we are using Unicode, things get a whole lot messier in some respects, and a whole lot clearer in others (at least from my standpoint).

The Unicode character set is freakin' huge!  Fortunately, it encapsulates ASCII (which uses one byte to represent each charcter) as the first 127 characters, so ASCII works the same in Unicode.  ISO 8859-1 also does this, so ASCII text works the same in all three environments, thank Gawd!

Further to an offline discussion betwixt our good Chief and myself ...

I've uploaded a copy of the Character Entities set to the Heaven forum.  Synbols look fine to me via latest versions of Firefox (66.0.5), IE 11 (11.706.17134.0), Edge (42.17134.1.0) and Chrome (74.0.3729.131), but I'd appreciate it if you all could confirm either with any of the above, or hopefully with any different browsers/versions you have installed.  :>

link to a message in another game
This message was last edited by the player at 11:29, Tue 14 May 2019.

In reply to Skald (msg # 19):

Yup.  All good here.  Looks like an impressive subset of Unicode UTF-8 if I don't miss my guess, but it's just a guess.

In other news, Section 15 is up, with Section 16 to follow when I get time.

Oopsie, forgot my system information:


Computer:  Dell Precision M4600 Mobile Workstation.
Video:     Nvidia Quadro 2000M, 2GB RAM.
Displays:  High brightness/contrast 1920X1080 flat panel
           1600X900 flat panel over the laptop's screen.
RAM:       4 GB
CPU:       Intel i5 2520M Dual-Core operating at 2.6 GHz, hyperthreading enabled
HDD:       Patriot Burst 480 GB SSD
OS:        PCLinuxOS 2019.02 (64-bit, of course)
Browsers:  Google Chrome Version 74.0.3729.131 (Official Build) (64-bit)
           Flashpeak Slimjet Version 21.0.8.0
              (based on Chromium 70.0.3538.67) (Official Build) (64-bit)
           Firefox 66.0.3 (64-bit)

All browsers render correctly


This message was last edited by the GM at 07:10, Wed 15 May 2019.