Hi
It’s perfectly legitimate to use tables to lay out pages; Keith is plain wrong on that score. In fact Freeway itself uses tables to space html boxes when creating non-CSS pages.
But Freeway has some irritating limitations when using tables to lay out pages, and these kind of make it much more difficult than it should be. So Keith is in a sense correct (in terms of using tables within Freeway).
The most fundamental weakness in Freeway is that it requires an absolute dimension in pixels for cell, row or column. Tables or cells in Freeway cannot be specified in ems or % or have their height left blank, even though this is perfectly legitimate (and desirable, as in your case) coding practice.
The reason for your problem was that the problem cells containing text have had their height set by Freeway to a certain number of pixels, based on the height required to fit the text you typed into that cell in Freeway. This height then gets coded by Freeway into the output as the minimum cell height. The cell will never get smaller than this, even if the browser font is miniscule. If the browser uses a smaller font than you had in Freeway, the cell does not ‘shrink down’ onto the text, so that the text does not completely fill the cell anymore, and there remains a line or so of white space below the end of the text. If you could set the cell containing text to ‘zero’ height - a perfectly legal coding practice - this problem would not exist.
But it is not possible, ordinarily, to tell Freeway to set ‘zero’ height for a table row or cell. In Freeway v5, zero height (flexible height) is (finally) allowable for html boxes, but still not possible for table cells.
This severely hampers using tables to lay out pages in Freeway.
Fortunately there is an action called “remove dimensions” that you can install. When applied to a table, it strips out whichever table dimensions you specify, so that the table can then become ‘liquid’ and stretch to fit different font sizes. This also allows tables to become horizontally stretchy too. Using this would solve your problem, and restores a lot of very useful table functionality to Freeway.
Sometimes, the ‘Freeway Way’ is easier. You can sometimes just draw html boxes wherever you like and leave it to Freeway to do all the page layout stuff for you. On the other hand, sometimes this just doesn’t turn out right either, especially if the user changes the font size on their browser. Nesting html boxes with relative dimensions - especially now that you can set html box heights to zero - ends up achieving something very similar to what one can achieve with tables.
For a straightforward page like yours, however, why not try just making one large html box, typing all your text into it, and inserting the graphics inline at the right places in the text. Everything will move up and down as required with the text if the font size of the browser is changed. If you want more than one graphic horizontally across the page you can put inline tables inline inside the same html box, use the remove dimensions action to force the table to 100% of the enclosing div, and then put the images inside the cells (all cells ending up with zero heights). Or you can put html boxes inside other html boxes, specifying relative offsets at right and left for the contained html boxes.
Freeway delivers a lot of flexibility and a lot of CSS functionality, however my experience is that to get really high quality pages out of it requires a fairly extensive understanding of coding practice, and it is necessary for the user to figure out a whole bunch of workarounds.
Good luck
Chris.
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