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• • October 28, 2016 at 4:27 pm #89399
    Scott Falkner

    Member

    I am trying to get my head around table styles, since I’m teaching an InDesign course and tables are next week’s subject. I want to show how one can define paragraph styles, then cell styles, then a table style in order to apply most of a table’s formatting in one step.

    But the process is incredibly buggy. For many cells the fonts are not applied. It looks like the entire paragraph style feature is ignored. I though, well, what if I select a range of cells and right-click on the cell style and select Apply [cell style]. Clear Overrides, it should work. It does, when it doesn’t crash.

    Also, it looks like the answer is no, but is there any way to define row height or column width in cell styles or table styles? What about divider lines? I can select the stroke either side of a cell but not the divider between cells. This forces me to clean up the edges of the table where I don’t want strokes.

  • October 29, 2016 at 4:13 am #89424
    Kai Rübsamen

    Member

    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

    • October 29, 2016 at 11:54 am #89425
      Scott Falkner

      Member

      Thanks, Kai. To respond to your points…

      1. The text has no ParagraphStyle applied. The behaviour is the same with no style, Basic Paragraph Style (my most hated feature in InDesign), or any other style. There seems to be no way to apply Paragraph Styles to cells without Option-clicking on the Cell Style.

      2. When I edit the Table Style to change stroke drawing order the change is evident on screen.

      3. I am using alternating row and column strokes in the table setup. First 1: [stroke attributes I want], Next: 0. Then using 0 pt. no colour strokes for the table borders, which gets me what I want.

      4. No poo.

      Table and Cell styles improvements look like low hanging fruit for an upgrade. But not low enough for the next upgrade, apparently. Yay scalable arrowheads, but why not editable arrowheads?

      The benefits of styles are: Quick formatting, global formatting changes, and consistent formatting. But leaving out so many options weakens all of those benefits. How hard would it be to add these…

      1. Add cell width and height to Cell Style. Conflicts will occur but can be resolved with a choice: Use largest value, use average value, use smallest value, prefer header, prefer footer, etc. Also allow these values in the Table Style.

      2. Allow more options for specific rows and columns instead of just left column and right column. This will greatly improve the value of including row height and column width. The panel in the Table Style dialogue for selecting rows and columns will need to be fully dedicated, not just half of Table Setup.

      3. Allow a Table Style to be applied to tabbed text from the Table Styles panel. This will convert the text to a table and apply the Table Style.

      4. Include header and footer rows in Table Styles.

      5. Fix the fucking bugs.

  • October 30, 2016 at 11:38 am #89430
    Kai Rübsamen

    Member

    Scott, instead of yelling what is not possible, you should give your students an overview, what IS possible ;-)

    I’ve no idea, what you mean with alt-click on cell styles. If I create a table style, cell style with applied pStyle and apply the cell style to the body rows inside the table style, everything is fine here.

    One last word: Surely there could be a lot of improvement here, but since the table feature is fully scriptable, it’s no problem to deal with headers, footers, width or height …

    Kai

  • October 31, 2016 at 5:13 am #89442
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Scott: My guess is that you have a character style applied to the text inside the cell. That is the most common problem people have that results in a paragraph style not changing the formatting.

    I also suggestion rebuilding your application preferences, and perhaps working in a new document. The table/cell/paragraph styles work fine, and don’t crash InDesign for us.

    I agree with Kai on his suggestions!

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