Add tables to journal

Feature Requests
1

I was thinking to make a journal on INaturalist, but found it pretty useless as I could not post tables here.

My initial idea, was to make simplified guides, which might help non-specialist to distinguish species in easier way. In some groups I need to explain in most my IDs, and interested people frequently request such a stuff:“Why this is A species and not B, where to look”?

This guides might be even how to distinguish 2 related species, where to look in specified genus,or how to Id beetles in one city etc. Most people, who are interested in nature are not used to dichotomous taxonomic keys and do not know specific terminology. When you are new to group, It is really hard to understand which characters are important to look, and which are not.

I sometimes do such a simplified local guides for myself, as I do a lot of ID work during my work, mainly not to forget experience I got with the group. And there are quite a lot of naturalists, who a doing such a stuff for themselves, for favorite taxa. Even real taxonomist could explain their own papers for ordinary people. Or hobbyists might do such a work for them. Unfortunately, both Guides and Journal features are totally unsuitable for such purposes, as tables - probably an easiest way to arrange text and images is unavailable there.

Overall, journal on Inat is virtually abandoned now, but full scale html with tables support, might resurrect It somehow. As a variant, text and tables might be added to Guides, but I doubt how it could be realized…

2

You can currently use HTML to create tables in journals. Example:
https://www.inaturalist.org/journal/bouteloua/19288-identifying-solidago-altissima-solidago-canadensis

The staff have previously solicited ideas for the redesign of journals, and they’ll likely add in some basic editing features to make it easier to format without requiring HTML knowledge.

5 Likes
3

You can add tables to journal and news posts, but you do need to know your html. Here’s an example - https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/arctiinae-of-southern-africa/journal/18169

Also, you need to change the html ‘type’ at the bottom of the creation/edit screen from Simple to None. Doing this means that you have to code the whole post, which is difficult if you don’t know html.

If you open my journal post above and right-click on it, choose View page source, and then scroll down all the way to The Key, you will see the html I used to create the table. You have to put in the parameters for every table cell. Mind you, I haven’t tried adding a css script to the post yet to try and make it more streamlined. I wonder if one can do that? (scuttles off to give it a bash ;-)

EDIT: No, one can’t do that :-(

1 Like
4

Perhaps consider making a guide?
https://www.inaturalist.org/guides

such as this one for telling apart yellow and red admirals in New Zealand, when they have their upper wings hidden:
https://inaturalist.nz/guide_taxa/276892

(not created by me, but I refer to it often!)

1 Like
5

Nice guide, kiwifergus!

6

Thank you! My initial mistake was to switch None to Simple, so I decided that It does not work at all…)

7

Yes, I also do not find ‘None’ to mean what I think it means. I asked @tiwane if None could be changed to Advanced. Looks like the devs decided not to do that, but they have added tooltips, so if you mouse over the options it gives you some idea of what they mean.

If the functionality you’re looking for does exist, then I suggest you close this topic?

1 Like