A BBCode Formatting Question

[Chrystal]

I'm trying to simulate the effect of a column of news print. If I were doing this in HTML I would probably use the following code:

<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="3" width="500" align="left" border="0">
<tr><td><p align="center">This is where I put the image</p></td></tr>
<tr><td><p align="justify">This is where the text would go and it would automatically right-justify and would wrap at a width of 500 pixels. This would give a nice columnar effect, resembling a newspaper column.</p></td></tr></table>

But if I try to do the equivalent in BBCode, removing all the extra and hopefully unnecessary parameters and tags...

Code Select Expand

[table width="500"]
[tr][td][center]This is where I put the image[/center][/td][/tr]
[tr][td][justify]This is where the text would go and it would automatically right-justify and would wrap at a width of 500 pixels. This would give a nice columnar effect, resembling a newspaper column.[/justify][/td][/tr][/table]

[table width="500"]

This is where I put the image

This is where the text would go and it would automatically right-justify and would wrap at a width of 500 pixels. This would give a nice columnar effect, resembling a newspaper column.

The width parameter has no effect!

Is there any way I can force the text to be only xxx pixels wide, without laboriously putting my own line breaks in?

[jouzinka]

Unfortunately, there is no easy answer except: no. :-(

It's been the source of headache for a long time now, but I don't think a solution has been found. :(

A quick fix I might try is to make this column an image and use the float tags.

[Chrystal]

I have actually found a solution that, while not entirely satisfactory, does at least give me the desired effect.

I create a two column table and put a blank rectangle, resized to height=1 width=500 in the first row of the second column. This at least forced the second column to be a minimum of 500 px wide, leaving the rest of window for the first column.

It works. I'd rather there were a way of actually using the "width" parameter on the table tag, it would be so much simpler.