Back

If your email is not recognized and you believe it should be, please contact us.

  • You must be logged in to reply to this topic.Login

Selecting Irregular Table Rows

Return to Member Forum

  • Author
    Posts
    • #66782

      Here’s one that’s defeated Adobe’s forums and just about any other indesign expert I can dig out – I’m sure you guys will have an answer – seems pretty basic stuff.

      I have a 60 page document with approximately 2 table per page (yes that’s 120 tables). My client wants a tint behind alternate rows to assist legibility – the trouble is, because of the nature of the product, it’s not nice regular alternate rows. I need to apply the same cell styling (across the entire row) but to irregular rows (for example rows 1,2, 5,9,11, 16). The ‘alternate row fill’ function won’t work here (will it?). What I want to be able to do is to multiple select irregular rows. In any other programme and on any other OS this is possible by holding down CMD (on the mac) and CTRL (on the PC) and clicking the rows you want. Once done you can apply the cell style sheet. It doesn’t work in Indesign – try it.

      So – what I’m left with is applying cell styling one row at a time (AAAAAAARGH!) or using Quark (2 x AAAAAAARGH!). So I throw my self on your mercy and seek a solution.

      For good measure – I can’t use the rule under / baseline shift trick here as I need to select vertically.

      I have put up a sample page here:

      https://www.carrdale.com/indesignCells.html

      Annoyingly – having gone to the trouble to create a page I realise this one is actually regular – but you get the idea!

      Huge thanks in advance.
      Martin

    • #66791

      What proportion are the irregularities? If they’re not so many, maybe start with the alternate row tints as the default table style, then adjust the exceptions afterwards?

      If you have to do it manually, you can speed things up with keyboard shortcuts for “select row”, and cell style shortcuts for “tint” / “no tint”. Then select a whole cell at the start of the table, and go down with the down arrow on the keyboard, using your shortcuts as you go. Easy to get into a rhythm I find.
      Also, if there’s a common paragraph or character style applied to the irregular rows, use find/change to find that style, set up a shortcut for “find again”, and combine that with the other shortcuts.
      Still a manual process, but can be surprisingly fast.

    • #66792

      Hi Thompson – thanks for your reply – much appreciated.

      Actually what you describe is pretty much the way I have decided to go (ie apply alternate tints and then manually amending). The problem is that productivity would be MASSIVELY improved if there WAS a keyboard short cut for selecting alternate rows (ie more than row at a time but not in sequence). This was the major problem described above. You can see my issue with the volume of tables. There’s a world of difference between ‘highlight row > apply style’ then ‘highlight next row > apply style’ and ‘highlight all rows requiring style > apply style’. A very rough calculation could add as much as 6 hours to the job – this doesn’t take into account client amends.

      One thought – do you know if it’s possible to write a script to add this functionality to indesign?

      Martin

    • #66793

      Fair enough. I’ve also been annoyed in the past by not being able to select “non-contiguous” rows, as I think some people call them. I did find that using a shortcut for “select (highlight) row” speeds things up, as then you’re no longer reliant on the mouse, and can do everything with the keyboard.
      I’m not a scripter unfortunately.
      Good luck,
      Chris

    • #66794

      Hi Chris – actually a keyboard short cut cmd/ exists for this (as a default)

      This seems such a massive oversight – you can do it in Quark which highlights what an oversight it is!

      Ah well – I’ll just have to get into the groove manually as you say.

      Thx

      Martin

Viewing 4 reply threads
  • The forum ‘General InDesign Topics (CLOSED)’ is closed to new topics and replies.
Forum Ads