Talk:Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management/Analytical Index/A

Transclusion issue

This page is not transcluding page 2010 onward. So far as I can tell, there's nothing wrong with that page. Seems that maybe one of the problems is to be found in the Template:TOCstyle arguments on that page, or perhaps just in trying to continue a TOC table for so many pages. Any help? -- Mathmitch7 (talk) 20:34, 25 November 2019 (UTC)

Suggestion: Follow the advice given at Module:TOCstyle/doc#Parameters subsection "Leader Control" and add these parameters to each occurrence of {{TOCstyle}} in the page range /2217-/2220:

|width=400px
|leaderrepeat=60

This will have the effect of vastly cutting down on the quantity of "dots" in the dot leaders being generated which should bring the overall template output back within mediawiki expansion limits. 114.78.171.144 12:00, 27 November 2019 (UTC)

I've tried doing this on all pages--it seems to have somehow bought me exactly one more page transcluded than I previously had; now the first page not transcluded is /2221. Any other ideas? -- Mathmitch7 (talk) 22:51, 27 November 2019 (UTC)

@Mathmitch7: The problem in essence is that wikimedia only supports templates expanding to a "magic number" of bytes (currently: 2097152) in size and this set of pages will almost certainly exceed that without some severe compromises. I tried substituting

|width=400px
|leaderrepeat=10
|leaderspacing=36px

for above which will eke out about one more page which is clearly not enough. The final idea (which I will not do without your agreement!) would be to sacrifice the dot-leaders altogether by replacing

|model=D.P

with

|model=DP

which is almost certainly going to work but at the cost of appearance. Sadly "proper dot-leaders" have been "coming real soon now" in HTML but are simply not yet fully supported by browsers. Things like {{TOCstyle}} use a very inefficient trick to try to compensate for the lack of proper native support. 114.78.171.144 06:18, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

I suppose another option would be to split the analytical index into alphabetical subpages, like Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management/Analytical Index/A with a brief TOC header of some sort. I think that may be the best solution. The proposal to do a list without dots as the repeating spacer would also work and I'm not opposed to it per se, but if we were to do that the pages would have to be narrower and ideally displayed as a multicolumn page in the mainspace transclusion (which I've never actually seen before). -- Mathmitch7 (talk) 15:50, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

@Mathmitch7: My personal vote would be to retain the dot-leaders but break the index into individual alphabetical groups per your suggestion. It is of course your call but I would also recommend propagating the

|width=400px
|leaderrepeat=10
|leaderspacing=36px

to maximise the number of pages which will fit into each group.

As for your other suggestion, in fact HTML5 supports automatically flowed multicolumns pretty well. If they are still O.K. for use have a look at the {{div col}} template family and note the options provided by {{column-count}}, {{column-width}}, {{column-gap}} and {{column-rule}}. There used to be in addition a {{column-break}} (not sure of name) which for some reason was controversial and has been deleted. However I am not so keen on this alternative — my 2¢ 114.78.171.144 06:11, 29 November 2019 (UTC)