Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-24302820-20140216213819

I have been adding slowly adding the equipment pages. Some of you may have noticed that these are very much not the same listings as in the original Red Book printing of the Codex.

While I am quite content with the particular formatting of the equipment pages, not everyone may be. One of the complaints I used to receive about equipment listings in the Red Book was that the prices weren't all right-aligned to the page. One person even specified that they would prefer this, even if it meant that the item listings themselves were no longer left-aligned.

I can just right-align everything. I checked that option out, and really didn't like the way it looked. Mostly it was the descriptions that uglified it. Making the description inline wih the rest didn't help.

I can make separate tables for each business, and have a couple of options there. One option would look very much like the current format, but the prices would all be right-aligned, and aligned by the 'decimal points' of guilder, florins, and farthings. The main problem is that this would be a royal pain in the ass to do. It'd look great, but take forever, and make me very frustrated along the way.

The second table option for right-aligned prices would be to make the descriptions inline with the rest of the listing. As these would be in a separate cell, the longer ones would wrap under themselves without breaking the formatting. This table would still have the 'decimal' alignment for prices, and would still be time-consuming, but less so than the previous option. I really have to question its readability, however.

One possible compromise would be a giant table with everything in it--everything. This is something I was considering anyway: a sortable table containing all items across all businesses. This would let you, for example, put all of the mirrors together, items currently scattered across multiple businesses. It would essentially be the same table as the Google Docs spreadsheet. I would be taking that, and reformatting for Wikia tables. The chief downside is that it'd be thousands of lines long.

So, we as a community can make a decision here. We can just leave things as the are, with the current formatting and a giant table to be added later. We can tabulate in one of two ways. Or, just right-align everything quickly. 