Help with table in bio

Question

I have this table in a bio - what do I need to add to move the entire table more to the centre of bio OR a step or two when using :: with normal text.

{|

|-

! scope="col" | '''Name'''

! scope="col" | '''Sex'''

! scope="col" | '''Age'''

! scope="col" | '''Birth'''

|-

!Stephen Davey

|Male

|40-44

|Cornwall

|-

|Elizabeth Davey

|Female

|40-44

|Cornwall

|-

|William Davey

|Male

|13

|Cornwall

|-

|Stephen Davey

|Male

|4

|Cornwall

|-

|Joseph Davey

|Male

|1

|Cornwall

|}

Answer 1

Roger, I have not tried this so I don't know if it will work with tables, but you might try using the <center>tag before the start of the table, then use </center> after the end of the table.  That is supposed to center whatever is between the start and end tags.

A brute force way of moving the table toward the right would be to add a column at the left and put several hard spaces (use trial and error to place as many as you need) in it on the first line, then have that column on each line but you can leave it blank.  Using your first line as an example:

{|

|-

! scope="col" | &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;

! scope="col" | '''Name'''

! scope="col" | '''Sex'''

! scope="col" | '''Age'''

! scope="col" | '''Birth'''

Not very pretty, but it will definitely do what you want, provided you remove the table borders.

Comments

Cheers Gaile - the <center> tags work

---

I'm so glad to hear it, Roger.  By the way - about the <center> tag … that's one that we're permitted to use, but in HTML, it's deprecated and has been replaced by the align attribute of the <div> tag.  Although the <div> tag will work here, that's another one we're not supposed to use and I hate the ragged right edges.  Until the <div> tag became a no-no, I always used <div align="justify"> the entire biography </div>.

Answer 2

Hi Roger - Take a look at this page about wiki tables - It should help https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Table

This section is the part I think you would need - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Table#HELP:TABLECENTER

{| style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; border: none;"

Comments

Mike, it's a shame, but we're not permitted to use style attributes here, which makes it very cumbersome to format things nicely.  Also, while Wikipedia has more complete documentation of wiki code than we do here, they are using the latest version of wiki code while we are 2 or 3 releases behind, so things that work there might not work here (although, in this case, your suggestion would work beautifully if it were permitted).

---

Many thanks to Gaile & Mike

I will leave it to the powers that be to sort the Style issues.

I also played around with the hard spaces (&nbsp;) although a bit more work the result looks better.

If anyone else trying tables with hard space or any repetitive typing

 REMEMBER to use Clipboard History Pro - saves a lot of time

---

Gail - Thanks for that bit of info. Probably saved me from having to make corrections to some things I am planning on doing. I just assumed it would have worked; but as you say the fact we are on version "prehistoric" could cause issues.

Hmmm - Maybe its time for a update?

---

Mike, the style attribute does work … for now, anyway, but there's always the chance that they'll disable it in the future.  It's just that we are not supposed to use it.  By the way, there are exceptions to the no-no's - we are permitted to use whatever we want on free space pages and profiles of close family members … again, though, there are no guarantees that what we use now will always be supported. In my opinion, the best way to find out if something works is to try it and see.

I don't think they're planning to update.  It would probably be a very big job to do it, since I believe they have done some customization of the translation from wiki code to HTML when the pages are compiled.