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Question

Control table row or cell formatting via EDD context rules?

Forum|Forum|12 years ago
January 17, 2014
2 replies
1967 views

Hi...

I think I know the answer to this, but is it possible to control table row or cell properties (like shading, padding, borders, etc) through context rules in an EDD? I'm not aware of any way to do this, but thought I'd toss it out there to be sure.

Would love to hear that I'm wrong.

Cheers,

...scott

Structured

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Smith_SK

Known Participant

Scott,

You probably know this.

In addition to Alex's reply, what you can do with custom ruling and shading for a table once it is in you doc is limited. Custom shading will not persist and custom ruling with not persist for the outside borders or any part of heading rows or cells. That too could probably be scripted.

Stan

ScottPrenticeAuthor

Inspiring

Stan and Alex...

Thanks for your confirmation of my understanding. I was hoping to be able to apply arbitrary formatting to rows/cells based on an attribute value without needing to provide a script to do that .. but it sounds like a script is the way to go. Would be great if Adobe could loosen up these restrictions!

Cheers,

...scott

L

Lynne A. Price

Inspiring

Scott,

Alex is correct that an EDD can set vertical alignment within a table cell as well as cell margins, but those are paragraph properties not table cell properties.

Stan's comments about custom ruling and shading are incomplete. Element definitions (whether defined in an EDD, by a script or FDK client, or through XML import) do not affect custom ruling and shading. Before FM 11, ruling and shading were not preserved in XML, so if you saved your documents as XML the information was lost. FM 11 and FM 12 can preserve this information in XML, given appropriate r/w rules and attribute declarations in the DTD. Even earlier versions could round-trip row format properties, but XML representation of the data is independent of what can be done in an EDD.

Tassos Anastasiou and I have also worked on a project where there was a requirement for users to control row and cell properties through the use of particular elements and attributes. We provided an FDK client that applied the desired properties when a user set an attribute or inserted an element. The plug-in does not check for changes resulting from paste or Find/Change. It does check everything before printing a document and provides users with an update command. It reads a configuration file that lists the affected elements and attributes, the affected properties, and the values that should be set. It is not restricted to table-related elements.

--Lynne

G

Gorly

Inspiring

Hi scott,

there's some differentation to be made here.

What you can do, is to set a table format for the table you try to import into FM. There are some manipulations you can do for those imported tables in the EDD: change margins and vertical alignment.

The manipulations can be done in a context rule in the tgroup element, or with a format change rule.

The table format can be given via context rule in the tgroup element also.

While you cannot manipulate shading and stuff directly within the EDD, it is possible to do this as a workaround with different table formats. But no matter how you do it, you will always be massively restricted by FMs table capabilities. You either have to live with a few predefined table formats in the template, or you need to do heavy scriptiing within FM.

To my knowledge there is no easy path for what you are trying to do (at least what I think what you're trying to do).

- Alex

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