Ok, so I spent a couple of hours messing around and came up with THIS - again, please forgive the crudeness but this is the kind of thing I originally had in mind. This was my main reason for using Zim in the first place - the simplicity of creating and linking pages like these together.
So, what I did was export the notebook to html and edited it with BlueGriffon, which allowed me to create the tables easily.
Is there any way I can get the best of both worlds here? That is, a nice easy to manage tree or hierarchy of pages integrated into an easy to use WYSIWYG editor like BlueGriffon. I've just found BlueGriffon but was also keen to try Kompozer - unfortunately I couldn't get it working in CentOS but I will try it out in Ubuntu when I can.
Well, I've had a look at Kompozer in Ubuntu and it's very similar to BlueGriffon but still not 'simple' enough for the likes of me. Basically a good solution here would be a Zim-like application with full HTML support but unfortunately, as weedeater64 stated, nothing like this seems to exist - well, to our knowledge at least.
So, for the moment I don't know what to do or how to advance, I suppose there are a few possibilities:
Continue with Zim and use 'image files' to populate the notebook with tables etc. My main concern with this approach would be the size of the notebook - bear in mind that one table (.png) imported to Zim roughly doubles the size of the notebook.
MediaWiki or something similar. This appeals to me more and more because it seems a lot better for a collaborative effort, but I am unsure how this would be achieved. Would this need to be hosted on a private server or could it be hosted for free (or cheap) online?
How about a Reddit Wiki? Would this work and allow anyone to contribute easily as the course progresses? It would be nice to keep all of this on Reddit I guess but am I just taking this too far from the original notebook idea?
Thoughts? Ideas? Suggestions? Criticisms?