I am making an HTML table. It has a lot of columns with fixed width (55 pixels). If I view it on full-screen IE window, the table fits on the screen and looks just as I want it to look. When I make the window smaller than the table, I expect horizontal scroll bar to appear. Instead each column shrinks; a cell which had:

becomes:

thus distorting the table and making it look ugly. Only when I make window so small that columns can not shrink any more (each is the longest word wide), does horizontal scroll bar appear.

How can I avoid this -- keep the columns same width regardless of window size? I already tried giving the table a fixed width -- it does not solve the problem, if anything makes it worse.

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

I have to wait until I get home to play around, but in the meantime: how are you setting the width? Are you doing it in HTML on the TD or COL elements, or setting the with CSS? As far as I remember, browsers may treat table cell widths in HTML as suggestions, and adjust to fit the content accordingly.

If you are not already, you may want to take a look as using CSS to format tables; perhaps some combination of setting the table cell width to 55 px and using the "overflow" property is what you need.

Nick

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Nick Theodorakis

I am (so far) setting it in TD tags.
Evidently!
Thanks, I will take a look at it.

__________________
Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

Here is an example for you with the cells 55px wide; no overflow property is set. The cells stay the same width, but no scrollbar appears and the table just goes off the edge of the screen when you shrink the viewport.

Nick

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Nick Theodorakis

I got a scroll bar in both FireFox and IE7.

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I'm not evil.
An evil person would do the things I think up.

On which website?

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

On the one linked by Nick in the post above my previous one.

__________________
I'm not evil.
An evil person would do the things I think up.

Sorry, I meant to say that my observation was made on IE6. I forgot to look at home where I have better browsers.

Nick

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Nick Theodorakis