John, why is there a need of for a table? Why not simply color the frame?

Rivkah, what makes the first para to the first para? If you can describe a rule for that (first para in a frame, first para after heading 1, first para in the story …), chances are good, that there is a solution with grep or a script. Please provide a example as idml.

Obviously not. But it can easy be written. How long it takes, depends on further needs, e.g. Is there a folder already, what should happen if there is a PDF already …

Kai

This can’t be answered correct, without seeing a document and there is also more information needed. You can contact me outside the forum at: forum@ruebiarts.de

Kai

I’ve no idea, why document or document typing is sometimes slow, but I hear often those problems in our german forums, if spanning columns, autosized textframes or a lot of grep-styles are involved. Good to hear, that it sometimes work.

@Masood: If I write, it works then it works, even with two columns created by textframe options. ;-) You can find the script in the mentioned thread, where Michel and I had some clever and cool ideas. Maybe it is time to clean up the code a bit. If i have the time, I will provide a new version directly for download.

View post on imgur.com

The screen shows a two column layout (2 columns by textframe options) and a para style with no overrides and no space before / above, because the space is part of the span feature.

@ Mike: The idea of the script is to find a range of paras with same style applied and apply a different style to the first and last para of that range. It is also possible to do a find / change e.g. to remove fake bullets at the beginning of that range or find only specific things with a GREP search.

Hi Guys,

I’m surprised that the feature caused such an enthusiasm here and thought that Michelle’s solution was already an old hat ;-)

I’m not sure if this was mentioned before:

InDesigns paragraphs have no connection to each other, even if they are part of a list. The spanning feature is creating inside a textframe something that I call a “Layoutzone” (similiar to a footnote section). Within this Layoutzone it is possible to have additional spaces and to stick things together, even in one column.

Therefore it is possible to fake lists with one style, where a space before and after is needed, but the list elements must stick together. If we write this in HTML, we have e.g. a unordered list as container and inside the list elements. While the CSS for list elements have no space above or before, the ul-element has space above/before.

@Dwayne: If bulleted lists are displayes correctly in EPUB depends on the bullets & numbering feature. Not if you use 3 different styles or one spanning style. In my test a bulleted list with 3 spanning paras is exported to the correct ul and li-elements > so no worry.

@ Masood and David: This works not only with one column, it works e.g. with two columns too. The trick is, to stick the list-elements together, e.g. span in 2, set breaking options to stick all paras together.

Maybe a warning: The spaning feature can slow down documents, cause every time something is added or deleted in text, the layoutzones are recalculated. So even if it is a cool trick for short documents, I would test it before running on longer documents.

And: We had this topic three years ago in the Adobe scripting forum and I write a script, that search for one para style and apply different styles to the first and last one of a list: https://forums.adobe.com/message/6620683#6620683

Kai

@Ron: Why not use the fill color of the table? And why is there an inset left and overset right? > If paragraph shading would be possible, the fills would not align perfectly.

@Masood: Sometimes things are not implemented, because no one have the idea to use a feature in that way or the engineers have no capacities for everything.

If I understand the feature correct, it is based on the fontsize of the paragraph. Since a table behave like a single character, but with no fontsize, it is not possible to measure the dimensions for the shading-feature.

Not helpful, but interesting: If you span your para, that hold the table, in two, insert a real character, then para shading is working.

So I vote either for table fills or a script, especially if the tables have different heights.

Kai