Added “Tables” to the Minecraft (Paper) Whiteboard Plugin

2026-08-30

The Whiteboard plugin developed at Nando Kobo is a plugin designed to bring “whiteboards where you can write text" directly into the world of Minecraft.

By posting text, you can easily share things like:

Today’s to-do lists
Command notes
Mission explanations for kids

in-game, which is super convenient.

However, as I continued to use it more and more, there was a feature I desperately started wanting:

I wanted to display things in a table format rather than just bullet points.

Where Bullet Points Just Wasn’t Enough

Up until now, since Whiteboard is text-based,
if you wanted to display a “Mission List," you had to write it something like this:

#1 Build a house (Level 1)
#2 Build an animal statue (Level 1)
#3 Build a mini racetrack (Level 2)

However, when actually playing with kids, I noticed a few things I wanted:

I want to sort them by level
I want to show “whether it has been completed or not" at the same time
I want to visually compare them at a glance

With bullet points, the moment you put a lot of information in, it tends to get vertically long,
and there’s a limit to how many items can be displayed at once.

So I thought, “It would be much simpler if I just turned it into a table."

What I Did This Time: Recognizing the table Tag

Therefore, I added a feature to the Whiteboard plugin that:

Reads HTML <table> tags and renders them as a simple table on the whiteboard.

The mechanism is roughly like this:

<table>
<tr><th>#</th><th>Goal</th><th>Level</th></tr>
<tr><td>1</td><td>Build a house</td><td>1</td></tr>
<tr><td>2</td><td>Build an animal statue</td><td>1</td></tr>
</table>

When you write the book’s contents into the Whiteboard, the plugin combines all pages of the book to retrieve them as text.
Edit that text using Codex, parse <table>...</table>, and break it down into rows and columns.
For rendering on the Whiteboard, display it as a |-delimited simple table.

|#|Goal|Level|
|1|Build a house|1|
|2|Build an animal statue|1|

Currently, it doesn’t draw “boxed borders" as graphical shapes,
instead treating it as a text-based table.

Even so, just being able to see “rows" and “columns" at a glance rather than a “long, trailing vertical list" has made it much easier to read.

How It Is Actually Used (Making a Mission List into a Table)

Speaking of the current mission, you can use it like this:

<table>
<tr><th>#</th><th>Goal</th><th>Level</th></tr>
<tr><td>1</td><td>Build a house (Free theme)</td><td>1</td></tr>
<tr><td>2</td><td>Build animal/mob statues</td><td>1</td></tr>
<tr><td>3</td><td>Mini racetrack (Short course)</td><td>1-2</td></tr>
<tr><td>4</td><td>Creature habitat series</td><td>1-2</td></tr>
</table>

When you write this in a book and post it on the Whiteboard,

the goals and levels line up horizontally.
The Issue of Books Not Fitting on a Single Page

Since Minecraft books have a character limit per page,
it’s completely normal for a single table not to fit on just one page.

To handle this, the Whiteboard side:

Concatenates all pages of the book before parsing them.

Because of this,

Even if a <table> ends at the bottom of the first page
And <tr>…</tr> continues onto the second page,

it can be handled as a single table without any issues.

The writer simply needs to do what feels natural: “If you run out of space, continue to the next page."

Summary: Being Able to Draw Tables Vastly Expands Whiteboard Use Cases

Added HTML <table> tag support to the Whiteboard plugin, allowing tables written in Minecraft books to be displayed as simple tables on the whiteboard.
While Minecraft books have character limits per page, treating the entire contents of the book as a single block of text allows multi-page tables to be handled seamlessly.
As a result, information that naturally forms tables, such as:
- Mission lists
- Level charts
- Incentive and progress management
can now be brought directly into the Minecraft world.

It’s still a simple implementation, but just being able to handle “tables" feels like it greatly expands the potential use cases for the whiteboard.

Moving forward, while actually playing with the kids, I plan to: