Reply To: Table styles incredibly inconsistent and flaky

Hi Scott,

first I can recommend Diane Burns title on table styles at lynda.com.

Second, the big secret is, to understand, how paragraph styles, cell styles and table styles are working together.

For example:
1. If you create a table and any other pStyle besides Basic Paragraph is selected before, you will get an override on [None]-cell style.
2. If you select cell strokes in the control or stroke panel > changing the stroke drawing order won’t work
3. It is easier to control strokes with alternating patterns at table style level, than apply cell styles
4. This list could have surely 10 more topics ;-)

So, if you set up your table, open table style, cell style, character style and paragraph style panel and watch what happen. Consider yourself before, what can be part of a table style and only the exceptions and the character formatting should be part of a cell style.
Realize, that only in minor cases header and footer rows are necessary. But realize also, that you can abuse header or footer rows, if you want e.g. a big stroke at the top or bottom of your table.

To your second question:
While row height or column width cannot be included in cell styles, it is very easy, to control these things with InDesign-Scripting.

I’m not sure, what divider lines are for you. If you mean a gap between two columns, try to create a custom stroke style, that shows only e.g. 50% of the stroke. The more your stroke increases later, the more your gap gets bigger.

Kai