Monday, August 9, 2010

Lingo - Over & Out




I added a post about Numbers on the Lingo blog here.
And have made a start at organizing that blog.
So I will not mention Lingo again in Disconnected Jottings.
Or at least, not in any detail.

What has taken so long, and is till not fixed, is trying to include tables in a Blogger post.

I assumed I would just find a button somewhere, to set up any table I wanted, like in Word or any word-processor program.
But after a lot of looking - nothing.

Googling showed that many, many people are looking for a way to do this, but with no success.
The approved method is to write your own HTML...
Did you ever try that, especially for a table?
You would need to be very desperate.

Slightly simpler is to create your table in a Google Docs Spreadsheet.
Then "Share" > "Publish as a web page".
Then copy the little block of HTML which is generated.
Then paste that into the HTML bit of your blog.
That produces the strange result at the top of this post.

All the content of the table is present.
But in a window which is too wide.
And too short.
So you need to scroll to see it all. (OK - I might be able to fix that).
And there is a bold header you don't want.
And a lot of junk underneath.
Useless!

You can try to make your table in a Google Docs Document, instead of a Spreadsheet, then share/publish/HTML/copy/paste that.
Which produces this improved result:

Edit: Removed for technical reasons...

No header or trailing junk.
The width is OK.
Still too short, so still need to scroll.
And tables in Google Documents can only have 20 rows - not enough in my case.

Next, I investingated Word & noticed you can "Publish as a web page" from there too.
And it works in Internet Explorer.
But I couldn't get it into Blogger.
Even following suggestions to wade through the enormous (absolutely enormous) HTML file & copy/paste only the bits between the "table" markers.

I tried publishing from Excel, which worked, but introduced half a page of blank space & lost the table layout.

Trying to copy/paste a table directly from Word into the non-HTML bit of Blogger (where you copy/paste text) produced a lot of red warning notices about "Tag not allowed META", so I had to abandon that.
Likewise pasting from an OpenOffice Document.

Finally (I thought) I found a recommendation to:
Produce the table in Word.
Upload & convert it to a Google Docs Document (it produced more than 20 rows, as required).
Then copy/paste that to the non-HTML bit of Blogger.
And it worked perfectly!

Until I wanted to edit the post (nothing to do with the table).
Then all the text in the table disappeared.
It's still there & appears in negative if you select it with the mouse.
But you can't see it normally...
Any table pasted from a Google Docs Document (without Word) produces the same result.
Aaarrrggghhh!!!


Letter
Sound
Like English
Not like
a
bat
art
b
bat
d
dot
e
bet
me - err
f
fit
g
got
gin
h
hit
i
hit
ire
j
job
k
kit
l
lit
m
mat
n
not
o
not
note
p
pat
r
rat
s
sat
is
t
tap
u
pull
gull
v
vat
w
wit
x
axe
y
yob
ivy
z
zap

So I am still looking for an easy method (without writing HTML) to insert a table neatly in Blogger.
I refuse to resort to a screenshot.

Parting thot: "The future will be better tomorrow." - Dan Quayle

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