Forums » Help » Chart Formatting Advice.

My character, Velari, has a chart on his profile that lists, or is supposed to list, all the possible elemental combinations he can generate. The catch is that I want each element and combination to have additional information, and I'm torn on whether to implement this with collapse or acronym; the former allows for formatting the information, but locks into one color for the element/combination, while the latter allows multiple colors for the combinations, but restricts formatting to caps lock.

I'm having trouble making a decision here, looking for some input to help resolve the internal conflict; or, perhaps some clever third option I'm not aware of.

So far as I can tell, acronym (which is not officially supported by RPR, but does indeed work) does not have any caps lock issue? I tried testing it out real quick, and everything stayed lowercase for me, just as I entered it.

If it helps any, while collapse does use the color of links (and would require both an Epic Membership and a bit of CSS savvy to change that to suit what you're after), the hidden text can still be colored by simple BBCode.

And a thing to be aware of: Acronym uses hover text, which comes with two additional issues.

• There is no indication to a viewer that there is any more info to see, unless you put in an explanation yourself.
• Hover text has issues on mobile devices. I'm not sure what all issues might arise, but for me, as an example, I can only see it if I hold the touch to mimic a hovering mouse, but that prompts my phone to open a menu over the text I'm trying to read and break the hover effect, so the text immediately vanishes again. I have a fraction of a second to read as much as I can.

While color may be an issue with collapse, and spacing and positioning might be too (I don't know what you're going for or if you've checked, I just know collapse can be sort of "bossy" about those so to speak), it's at least easy to tell there is more info and to actually see that info from more devices.

The issue is that as far as formatting text goes, Acronym can only support caps, not bold, italics, or anything else. I find myself wanting more flexibility.

Collapse defaults to link colors, yes, but the tag can also specify a color, no Epic Membership required. My issue with it is that it can only specify one color, so I can't pull something like "aurora" with a Collapse.

I never even thought of viewing RPR on mobile, but that sounds like something I might want to keep in mind.

I've already experimented with collapse, and yeah, it blows Column alignments out of whack when something is opened. That's a comparatively minor issue in my mind, though.

If I remember right, we have a number of members who access RPR primarily or exclusively via mobile, so it is definitely good to keep in mind.

I can think of one other alternative, although it would only be a counter to the alignment issue and can come with its own issues. If you're comfortable enough looking at HTML (via Inspect, at least in Google Chrome? not sure if it might be different in other browsers, but there should be an analogous function at least), you could have all the extra descriptions on another page or elsewhere on the same page and reference element IDs to link to the specific bit of text.

For example, this links to to this topic: https://www.rprepository.com/community/forums/topic/83865
But this links specifically to your prior post: https://www.rprepository.com/community/forums/topic/83865#post-5214763

Pros:

• Not a brat on mobile
• Doesn't freak out the alignment/positioning
• You could do rainbow effect, just still takes a bunch of color tags

Cons:

• Requires separating the info from where you want it, so not as tidy
• Requires ensuring each text bit gets its own ID'd element, which I think requires putting each in a separate widget - not just all in a single text widget, and present limit is 10 widgets to a page
• Requires being able to identify the appropriate ID
• May call for handy links back to your chart