[Sage of Seattle]

I'm rather embarrassed that I forgot that this subforum exsisted on THR (thanks Correia for reminding me about it!) :)


My question: I would like to post in a thread a rather long list of countries and I wanted to put it in three or four columns for neatness and to not make people scroll down endlessly. I know a little of coding and so on, but I can't find what I'm looking for via a vbulletin google search.

Any help would be appreciated.

[Mal H]

Unfortunately, there is no clear cut method to create columns in vbulletin. The closest usable tag is the "code" tag. That tag preserves spacing in your text.

Example:


a[5 spaces]b[5 spaces]c
d[5 spaces]e[5 spaces]f


(The [5 spaces] indicates that there are actually 5 spaces in between the letters. There is no way to simulate that without losing the spacing in the example.)

will yield the following:


a b c
d e f


However, it's not foolproof. You are somewhat at the mercy of the font the user has selected on his system.

[Sage of Seattle]

Thanks Mal.

As a follow up question, wouldn't the HTML code tags work? I read something about being able to use HTML within vbulletin (besides the example you gave), like a table format?

Maybe it's not worth the effort, but I appreciate your response.

[Mal H]

I'd say give it a try in the Testing forum. The tags exist, but I haven't read my copy of "HTML For Dummies" so I have no clue as to what goes in between them. ;)

[tyme]

There's a specification for columns in css2 or css3 or something, but last I checked only mozilla supported it, and only with non-standard css tags.

There's also the problem that columns don't work well when you have a multi-page document and no clear page boundaries. Even for pages that do take advantage of firefox's proprietary columns implementation, in order to read it sequentially you have to read all of column one, then go back to the top of the page and read all of column 2, then go back to the top and read all of column 3. It's a pain.

Columns are for pagebreaked (pagebroken? :> ), published documents only. For html, automatic columns simply don't make sense 90% of the time.

doesn't do what you think, mal... it's sort of like [code]. :)

[html]
<p>Test paragraph</p>
<p>Test p2, <i>italic</i> <b>bold</b></p>

see?

[Mal H]

No, tyme, it does exactly what I thought it did, which is nothing. That is, I had no idea what it did. That's what I meant by, "I have no clue as to what goes in between them."

[tyme]

Oh... it does syntax highlighting.

Like [code], it also prevents line-wrapping, instead creating a fixed-width box so that the page doesn't expand to the right if the tag contains long lines.