Talk:When the Earth Trembled

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Cast table formatting

@Mtjannetta: As I mentioned when you asked on my talk page, MOS:NO-TABLES explains that a table should not be used to for positioning images. At certain screen sizes, the images won't stack properly, which squeezes the table's first two columns so that each name takes up two lines. Why would you wait two days to then revert this with no explanation? hinnk (talk) 22:27, 27 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry!

When I checked the your talk page I probably missed your response. Sorry again!

I have formatted the "cast" sections of all my movie articles the same way. You are the first one to point out a problem.

If there is a better way to continue to list the cast and retain the newspaper image - I'm all for it.

I choose inserting the image as part of the table because that method allowed me to regulate the size of the image in proportion to the cast listing. If you have a better wiki-approved way to achieve my goal, please advise or just change.

Sorry for any misunderstanding

Michael Jannetta (talk) 02:55, 29 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

No worries, glad it was just a misunderstanding and I appreciate the apology. So, specifying the image size based on the cast listing creates several issues. Any time you set a fixed number of pixels, it means readers' size preference settings get disregarded. Here, mobile app users will get a smushed cast listing, next to an image so large that they have to scroll horizontally to see it. Or table formatting means images won't stack, and at certain sizes, the table doesn't span the full screen width and gets pushed to the left. Sometimes it's best to keep the styling as simple as possible, because the wiki is designed to automatically handle these cases without us having to think about them.

I hope I'm not being presumptive if I say that I also spend time expanding film articles that don't get enough love (for me it's experimental cinema), and I completely feel you on how tricky it to have to come up with a suitable article style without much input from other editors. It can be a lot of additional work tracking down sources for these articles, so I'm glad someone's doing it! This might be a good opportunity to reimagine the format you've been using. You could try using {{Cast listing}} for the cast listing, which will automatically create multiple columns so there's no empty space in the section. Or, notice how the ad here doesn't mention any of the cast members, but there's an entire gallery of cast members (plus the director) in a later section. Why not merge them? Pull the images up into the Cast section so the characters' names and actors' photos are in proximity; then the ad can go under Production, since that's where Lubin is mentioned. The Last Edition is a similar case, where two nearly identical sections could be simplified by merging them. If you do decide to include multiple photos next to prose or lists, {{Multiple image}} can be super useful for that, if you aren't already familiar. The template page has notes on how to use it, and here's an example on how it can be used for cast photos. hinnk (talk) 05:20, 29 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]