Columns of unequal widths

Offline MediaWiki Code Editor

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An assistant to divide a previously selected text into columns of uneven widths.

This assistant offers a technique to split a portion of text into columns of unequal widths and similar heights, even if you do not know the MediaWiki rules for columns.

This technique is partially based on the {{col-begin}} template. You can find more information about this template in the Template window (see: Templates). This template do not automatically split text into columns, so users of this template must split manually the text and to assign portions of text to each column what implies a wasting of time making trials.

Although partially based on the {{col-begin}} template, this assistant has been especially designed to split automatically text into columns to produce columns of similar heights. If you need columns of different heights, you can later move some text from a column to another, or to use the {{col-begin}} template instead of this assistant.

The assistant allows to choose the following:

1. Relative width of the group of columns in relation to page width.

2. Number of columns (2-3) More than three columns are not recommended.

3. Relative width of the first column (in %).

Relative width of the group of columns in relation to page width.

This width is normally limited to 95% to keep the columns inside the limits of the page. But you can choose even lower values. Note that with this assistant the group of columns will be always centered in the page.

Number of columns.

The assistant allows to split automatically the text into two or three columns. It is rare to need more than three columns of text. The interesting aspect of this assistant is the possibility to produce columns of unequal widths and similar heights. If you need more that three columns, you should better use the assistant for columns of equal widths.

Relative width of the first column.

You can only fix the relative width of the first column. If you are building two columns, this means that if you fix the first column width to 30%, the second column will be 70% of the width of the group of columns. But if you are building three columns, then the 70% will be distributed equally between the second and third columns, thus producing the following distribution:

30% for the first column

35% for the second column

35% for the third column

Remember that the assistant has been designed to split the text to produce columns of similar heights. If you include, in any column, some elements, like cites, images, external links or infoboxes, the columns will no longer have a similar height, so you should have to adjust manually the height of the columns moving some text from one column to another.

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