[Resolved] Tables

[Sunsette]

Hi, yes, I am a compulsive data tabulator, or at least I pretend to be one in my four-color fantasy game. I am perfectly fine with having a WYSIWYG editor, I'm actually kinda sick of BBCode, but one way or the other I would really love the ability to use tables -- especially something as simple as wiki or markdown syntax tables. <table><tr><td> just becomes tl;dr or at least too long; hated myself for writing. Pseudo-HTML like the previous implementation's form of tables is really annoying when you don't even have any formatting controls in those tables.

 

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

[Cipher]

2 hours ago, Sunsette said:

Hi, yes, I am a compulsive data tabulator, or at least I pretend to be one in my four-color fantasy game. I am perfectly fine with having a WYSIWYG editor, I'm actually kinda sick of BBCode, but one way or the other I would really love the ability to use tables -- especially something as simple as wiki or markdown syntax tables. <table><tr><td> just becomes tl;dr or at least too long; hated myself for writing. Pseudo-HTML like the previous implementation's form of tables is really annoying when you don't even have any formatting controls in those tables.

 

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

 

Tables have been added:

 

Wow, a table!

Header1	Header 2
Wow	it's
a	table!

 

Thank you for the suggestion 🙂

[Cipher]

Just a quick note, that you can use CTRL+Right Click to edit the table after it's been created.

[Sunsette]

! Thanks so much! That was a rapid implementation. I don't see the button on my posting bar yet -- will it just take some additional time to proliferate?

[GM Fiddleback]

(pssst.  There was a boo boo.  'tis better now.)

[Sunsette]

Ctrl+Right-Click does not appear to work for me in editing an existing table. Tested on Google Chrome. Sorry to be a pain in the neck.

 

As a much, much more minor point, it would be nice to have shortcut functionality when editing where hitting tab advances to the next cell, but I have no idea if that would be difficult to implement. 

Edited July 26, 2019 by Sunsette

[Some Random User]

Cutting and pasting of tables is also giving inconsistent results.

 

Does the text widget interpret them as tab delimited? The time I got the table to paste out to a .TXT editor I got tab-separated text.

[Cipher]

I don't seem to be having any problems with Ctrl+Right Click or pasting tables; I'll investigate this.

 

Pasting the previously posted table:

Header1	Header 2
Wow	it's
a	table!

 

[Some Random User]

I'm using a browser other than Edge, Safari, Chrome, or Firefox. I'm curious if the editor may not play nice with others.

[Sunsette]

 

 

Results on Chrome. Because I was dumb I haven't tried disabling all addons yet though none of the ones I have on are typically interference heavy. Will do when back at my desk. 

 

Firefox gives me better-ISH results, but I can't actually alter the number of rows or columns, which is a bit of a bummer.

 

Edited July 26, 2019 by Sunsette

[Cipher]

3 hours ago, Sunsette said:

Ctrl+Right-Click does not appear to work for me in editing an existing table. Tested on Google Chrome. Sorry to be a pain in the neck.

 

As a much, much more minor point, it would be nice to have shortcut functionality when editing where hitting tab advances to the next cell, but I have no idea if that would be difficult to implement. 

I've added a few more plugins to the editor; you should now find that tables are a bit better to work with as you can now do the following:

• Use [Tab] to go to the next cell
• Change column sizes by dragging the vertical border/line
• Add, remove, insert rows & columns using the [Ctrl] + [Right Click] menu
• Select multiple cells at a time to apply properties to them all at once
• Set properties on cells such as individual cell size, spanning, alignment, and background color.

 

I was unable to reproduce your issues with the [Ctrl] + [Right Click] menu on FireFox or Chrome (it works on both for myself), it is possible that an extension is causing an issue with it; I will continue investigating this.

[Sunsette]

31 minutes ago, Cipher said:

I've added a few more plugins to the editor; you should now find that tables are a bit better to work with as you can now do the following:

• Use [Tab] to go to the next cell
• Change column sizes by dragging the vertical border/line
• Add, remove, insert rows & columns using the [Ctrl] + [Right Click] menu
• Select multiple cells at a time to apply properties to them all at once
• Set properties on cells such as individual cell size, spanning, alignment, and background color.

 

I was unable to reproduce your issues with the [Ctrl] + [Right Click] menu on FireFox or Chrome (it works on both for myself), it is possible that an extension is causing an issue with it; I will continue investigating this.

Ahahaha. I am an idiot. I forgot that I had added an extension a while back SPECIFICALLY to intercept sites trying to prevent right-clicking. I whitelisted this site, and whaddayaknow, it works.

 

 

I'll make sure to REMOVE EXTENSIONS before commenting about functionality errors next time. My apologies.

 

As for the other changes, thank you very much. I appreciate your hard work and responsiveness.

[Cipher]

1 minute ago, Sunsette said:

Ahahaha. I am an idiot. I forgot that I had added an extension a while back SPECIFICALLY to intercept sites trying to prevent right-clicking. I whitelisted this site, and whaddayaknow, it works.

 

 

I'll make sure to REMOVE EXTENSIONS before commenting about functionality errors next time. My apologies.

 

As for the other changes, thank you very much. I appreciate your hard work and responsiveness.

No worries! Glad it works for you now. If you have any other suggestions feel free to let us know 🙂

[Oubliette_Red]

13 hours ago, Some Random User said:

Cutting and pasting of tables is also giving inconsistent results.

 

Does the text widget interpret them as tab delimited? The time I got the table to paste out to a .TXT editor I got tab-separated text.

I use Firefox and have the same issue with trying to paste spreadsheet data into the table. It either wants to insert is as an image, drops it all into a single cell, or does nothing at all if I choose the paste as text option.

[Oubliette_Red]

I found a less than optimal work-around for inserting spreadsheet data into tables.

 

Since my posts already have the data in BBCode tables, I was able to drag-select all the cells in my current tables and past them into the new tables.

Warning: Work in a new post and not in an original. On my the first attempt, when I saved, the new table disappeared. Fortunately I still had it sitting down in an open reply. <whew>

If you have a lot of data, I highly recommend using PK's BBCoder tool for creating tables, it was a life saver.

[Some Random User]

10 hours ago, Oubliette_Red said:

I use Firefox and have the same issue with trying to paste spreadsheet data into the table. It either wants to insert is as an image, drops it all into a single cell, or does nothing at all if I choose the paste as text option.

20 hours ago, Cipher said:

If you have any other suggestions feel free to let us know 🙂

Yay! Let's talk about computer programming.

 

When you try to paste the text widget needs to know what you're trying to do. That means you have to either have the widget notice the clipboard has spreadsheet info instead of just text. The problem is that spreadsheets are "delimited" in different ways, meaning the data in them is stored differently. (Most of them are just like .TXT with a tab between the cells, or a comma between the cells, etc.) That means you're never getting an "automatically knows" behavior. The ideal functionality may be to presume the user is copying from "tab delimited" because that's what both M.S. Excel and Liber Office Calc use. Tabs are also used at the beginning of every paragraph in a lot of text sources (which is why those spreadsheet formats used a tab between the cells). All of that means you're not going to have spreadsheet info automatically get recognized. I feel that just isn't practical to expect. If the coders who have to make this a reality want to fix things differently, that's fine. They should be competent and know how much time they don't want to invest in this trivial matter.

 

A guideline I like to use is, "if I wanted to fix this, could I fix this in less than an hour?" Going by that standard what we can expect is something more specific. How about this simple approach: "If the cursor is in a table that's already been created for the post, anything pasted interprets a tab as moving to the next cell."

 

This would require you to make a table first, but would let you drop pasted data into the post quickly.

Edited July 27, 2019 by Some Random User
added quote