linked text-boxes fill up irregularly

Can’t seem to find a solution for this. This site of mine (www.alleswordtbeter.nl) consists of linked text-boxes with inline graphics and, of course, text. They look fine when editing, but the columns of text don’t fill the boxes evenly. Text in the first box is as it should be, second is shorter, third one is even worse. I’ve experimented with undefined height, without luck. I’m probably doing something wrong, if I only knew what. Any suggestions?

MM


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On 23 Jun 2010, at 12:29, Marcel Möring wrote:

Can’t seem to find a solution for this. This site of mine (www.alleswordtbeter.nl) consists of linked text-boxes with inline graphics and, of course, text. They look fine when editing, but the columns of text don’t fill the boxes evenly. Text in the first box is as it should be, second is shorter, third one is even worse. I’ve experimented with undefined height, without luck. I’m probably doing something wrong, if I only knew what. Any suggestions?

Forgive me if I’m being thick here, but isn’t it just because you have different numbers of words in each box? I believe Freeway will allow you to link boxes in the software, but that technique doesn’t carry over to the Web itself; there are no linked boxes on the Web. So your boxes are filled differently depending on the number of words in each box; I don’t think you’ll ever get them to match. I think what I’d do is to use an undefined height and accept that the boxes will be different lengths; it doesn’t necessarily look silly. Also, that way, the text won’t burst out of the bottom of the boxes when you enlarge text in the browser.

best wishes,

Paul Bradforth

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http://www.paulbradforth.com/books/


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You could try using a single wide box, and the CSS3 Columns Action to do this layout. Note that IE will render it as a single wide box, but modern browsers will show it in as many different columns as you specify in the Action. This guarantees even columns (up until the last one – no magic can fix an odd/even mismatch between lines and columns).

Walter


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Excellent advice and good tips. Thanks, both of you.


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Tried CSS3 Columns and really like what it does. That is: in Safari. Every IE incarnation, though, renders it -as Walter said- as one big box. I’m afraid that means back to the drawing board.


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I did something once with Prototype that split a bunch of checkboxes (each wrapped in its own paragraph with a label) into columns based on the container width, but I’ve never tried to do that with random-length paragraphs of text. The problem is breaking a paragraph at the end of one column and picking it up again at the next column is a non-trivial assignment. It requires your script to understand the HTML structure of the content it’s splitting, not just to count words and put a similar number of words in each bucket.

I am not sure where you will find a solution that does this without fail in all browsers.

Walter


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