Reply To: Table Stroke Issues & Frustrations

Hi Coleen,
I really appreciate your taking the time to show the workaround ideas. The gradient in the footer would work well for that scenario, as long as the rows remained a consistent height I suppose (though I thought header/footer rows had to have same content). That’s good thinking!

Unfortunately, what we wanted to be a transparent gradient border is the top border of each cell/row.

So in your example, the borders above the item & price cells would have the gradient rules with transparency. But this is not possible to add as either a paragraph rule or as a table border, as both just use a gradient swatch which has no transparency. I thought about embedding an object in each cell, but it would have the same issue as a paragraph rule – wouldn’t work right if text doesn’t align top (and adds a lot of complexity).

To give a better idea of what we’re doing compared to your example, our ‘Item’ column has photo thumbnails, and our ‘Price’ column has all the corresponding product details. Unfortunately, the product details can vary from maybe 2-7 lines of text, depending how how verbose the client is. So there’s no way to know the offset for the top paragraph rule, as it is constantly varying. If text was top-aligned, we’d be fine and wouldn’t have these issues. But it left too much empty space at the bottom of description cells when the content was short.

Ugh, tables. So necessary sometimes, but so frustrating as well…

Thanks!