Template talk:Conworld/Sub-book

If you desire more padding around the text, you can use padding:20px;, for instance. -- Adrignola talk contribs 13:41, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

The switch to ambox caused several formatting anomalies on various transcluding pages, so I reverted. It isn't immediately obvious exactly what was causing the anomalies &mdash; I'm thinking there may be a common cause even though the anomalies didn't really look all that similar to each other &mdash; and I don't relish trying to track it down. (I also, personally, dislike the look of ambox for the purpose, but that's a separate matter.) --Pi zero (talk) 15:20, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

The only thing I see different about the ambox version is that the border is slightly thinner. The mbox-side -> mbox dependency is a problem; countless templates that might be useful at Wikibooks can't be easily imported because the mbox here has been altered so heavily. I think you may be using an old version of the Common.css. If the box at right doesn't look very similar to what's on the main page of this template, then that is why you didn't see what I saw. If you look at the code, yes it requires defining some styles; maybe those styles should be updated on mbox-side instead (just calling ambox instead of mbox so it can be updated). -- Adrignola talk contribs 15:40, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

It appears to me that something quite subtle is going on &mdash; subtlety of the sort that I generally deal with by finding ways not to have to deal with it, because that way lies madness. The ambox you've shown above does look very similar to what's now in the template... but what it does "in the field" is another matter. Here are three examples to illustrate the differences I'm seeing. These aren't going to come out quite right, because (in a known but unexplained anomaly), the color on the left-hand border doesn't appear on talk pages. (And they're going to take up rather a lot of space on this page...)

What the images on the Conlang page look like, under the mbox-side version:

What the the images on the Conlang page look like when the mbox-side version is replaced by an ambox version:

A variant using the ambox, with wiki table markup to force the two boxes to stack vertically: Interestingly, the horizontal mismatch between those two right-hand boxes is not due to the fact that the blue bar shows on the ambox but not on the mbox-side: even on the Conlang page, when I switched the template over and put this table mechanism in place, the left-hand sides misaligned this way. My guess is that this misalignment is related to the overlapping-with-adjacent-text that I observed at Conhistory.

(A general observation about the whole incompatible-mbox issue: If the current WB mbox is incompatible with what's expected by templates elsewhere, then the mbox used elsewhere is likely just as incompatible with what's expected here.  The problems, in both directions, are likely to be many and very subtle.  It might make sense to rename WB's mbox to a different name, laboriously change everything to use the different name, and then when nothing likes to Template:MBox, bring in the uncustomized version.

--Pi zero (talk) 20:17, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Adding a clear:right; takes care of the floating issue but not the horizontal position. Current template using Mbox have to have two things change such that they Mbox doesn't have to be renamed: the msg parameter changed to text (I've added code to Mbox to take either at this point) and the use of the full image notation with size included (something that would have to be done after Mbox is updated. In many cases that can be avoided by having a template use cmbox/ombox/ambox, not all of which existed here until recently (ambox is very similar to the current mbox except, as you've proven, when it comes to the above).  The updated mbox actually just calls one of those based on the namespace; for templates only used in a particular namespace, they are able to call a *box directly. I brought in the relevant code from Mbox to Mbox-side so that the templates can evolve independently.  Mbox-side doesn't exist at any other project so I don't foresee any conflicts. -- Adrignola talk contribs 21:15, 23 April 2010 (UTC)