The formatting in the text list generator is awful when you use tab as the seperator.

Question

I have to use the text list generator a lot for organizing for a worldbuilding/fanfiction project, and I'm very frustrated with how badly everything is listed when you use tab. When you use tab as the separator, the way each entry should be listed is not consistent, with some entries having way more space between information than it should, and others not having enough space. It's all very out of line.

Answer 1

This happens because the generator simply puts one tab between every value in the row. This is the conventional way of writing tab separated values. It's done this way because the data is primarily intended to be ingested by computers, not really humans. The generator isn't trying to create a list that looks wonderful (but there is a hope that it's a little easier to eyeball than comma separated values).

How exactly are you reading the data? If you're just reading it right there on the website, why not save it to a file and open it with a spreadsheet viewer instead? Google Sheets is free, and so is LibreOffice if you're a little bit crazy. There's also the Pokedex with stats that has all but a few features of the generator.

(disclaimer: i didn't make the tool)

Comments

Thank you.