Quote:
Originally Posted by roguebfl
No they can only handled SMALL tables ok. epub will NEVER be possible to handed tables well because the lack of side scrolling will always break them, and side scroll would break there flow purpose of epub.
|
"epub" is HTML in a pretty hat, an index, and a zip file.
So with that said, I am here to tell you that it is 100% possible to automatically decompose a properly set up HTML table of arbitrary width into a "narration" style of format that would work perfectly well in e-readers aimed at novels.
It's not the
greatest way to read a table, but it works. It's also the recommended way to do enormously wide tables for braille, which you may think I'm joking about but I've had to deal with 20+ columns on combined cable/cellphone statements and stock reports :P
As an example, I'm going to use the first few entries of the first Melee Weapon Table, the AXE/MACE table. There's a couple of different ways to approach this for print (rather than braille), but this is one example. It can all be implemented via stylesheets, or via a preprocessing pass after generating the epub.
This format is also
very friendly to text-to-speech, for blind customers, or just for hands-free reading.
The awesome thing about living in the future is that document transformation is a hell of a lot easier than it used to be.
EDIT NOTE: For a braille table, you would put the notes about melee weapons
after the title "Melee Weapon Table" but
before all the actual tables. And print them only once, but SJG does that part already for pagecount reasons. You put it first so you can learn the footnotes and have them
mean something when you see them. IT's harder to flip back and forth in braille, and in e-readers - but in an e-reader you should be able to put a bookmark.