Localized text not arranged nicely in narrow table columns

[fchan]

I have "autofit to contents" tables with a narrow first column and wide second column. For example, the first column is for terms and the second column is for descriptions.

Flare is trying to save space and wrap lines in the first columns such that there are very few words per line (sometimes only one word per line) in the first column. This causes the entire table to consume less vertical space.

The narrow column in English isn't too bad but when it is translated to an Asian language such as Chinese, the first column might contain only one Chinese character per line like this:

Code: Select all

注   XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
意   XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

I'd like it to be:

Code: Select all

注意   XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
      XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

There's no UI in Flare that let me guarantee that there is more than one Chinese character per line in a table column. Does anyone know how to get around it? (NOTE: I can't use fixed column width because I can't predict what the width should be for various target languages. Autofit to contents is the best choice.)

[ChoccieMuffin]

Would it be possible to use table stylesheets and then adapt the stylesheets for each language? I've just discovered them (after years of using Flare! Shocking!) and I'm enjoying the control you can get. I have set up styles with names like "1narrow-2medium-3to5auto" so I can work out the shape of the table. If you do something similar you could adapt the width of table stylesheets for each language if necessary, so that "narrow" might be 10em in English but 7em in Chinese, for example.

I don't know if you'd want to let your localisation suppliers play with the table stylesheets or whether you'd prefer to adjust them yourselves but it might be the way to go, as the code in the topics themselves would be identical (apart from the words, of course!) and you would control the widths of columns outside the localised text.

Don't know if that helps, but it might be worth playing with for future projects.

[kwag_myers]

You can use a span with the display property set to inline. If it works, you should only have to apply the tag to the longest line in each table.