Automatic table/column width?

>WoodWing just dont see anything ilogical about giving user the option to save width a height of anything he created in INDD

That is because SmartStyles despite their name are not styles as such. They are macros that format the table in question at the time of application. They are not linked to the table. Change the library-element (i.e. SmartStyle) and nothing changes automatically in the document.
With macros you can apply formatting one after the other and there is no danger of discrepancies. Styles are and stay applied all at the same time and contradicting settings become a real problem.

Iam just testing a demo of commercial plugin WoodWing Smart Styles CS3 which not only saves all indesign formating and indesign's own object/paragraph/table/cell styles assigned to objects on page...

But it also deciphers row heights and widths from an object and save these into its style specification... sounds like the best of both worlds (standard InDesign stylesheets + little bit of extra properties managed by the plugin)

Hopefully one dont get overhelmed of all the styles he has to manage to create a working template style...

Smart Styles CS3 can save widths and heights of not only cells and columns but also text frames and picture frames... WoodWing just dont see anything ilogical about giving user the option to save width a height of anything he created in INDD...

for CS3 Adobe licensed Teacup Software table styles engine for their table styles, maybe in CS4 they could also bring in some ideas from WoodWing development team to give us an ultimate combination of both approaches...

I'm one who'd like row heights to be part of Cell Styles. For instance, in a calendar, some months require five rows, others require six rows, and each month can change from year to year. (Next year February only needs four rows, which is pretty unusual.) I'd love to be able to select the rows of the month in question and change the row height using a style rather than having to remember what the appropriate row heights are and typing it in the boxes, which are several menu/dialog boxes deep.

Rodney

My apologies for saying you could save a column width. I don't use tables a lot, and obviously my memory is flawed on that point. You definitely CAN save cell padding as part of a cell style applied in a table style.

Peter

I was just questioning somebody's claim

>Table styles allow you to specify cell padding, just as in CSS, and they allow you to specify a column width, also as in CSS...

which isnt true because as we all know you cannot style column width...

I dont see anything ilogical in saving width and height in a cell style... it could be at least optional so you could include it only if you wanted like some atributes in object style or character style are optional... iam not and engineer so the concept might break appart somewhere down the road... but excluding height and width atributes from styles completelly wasnt necessary...

I understand that saving fixed width in a cell style might lead to many oversets in cells from one table to another...

but common workflow is that you style 20-50 more or less similar tables with pretty same content with some variations here and there maybe a column added or deleted etc. but now you spend awfull lot of time trying to keep all the columns widths consistent etc. when in ideal world you could style them all with one click and then just pinpoint few local overrides here and there...

Well, at least there's some active discussion here. I currently have a 350 page doc with tables on nearly every page, and some of these settings would mean I could fine-tune things without a lot of overhead.

Andrew

> save column width into a table style ??? where ???

The OP wasn't about table styles, it was simply about column settings in tables.

I don't know for sure which way you're going on the styles issue. Whether you're saying to include cell width and height in table styles would be a disaster, or whether that they aren't there is a disaster (which is kinda illogical). That issue has been discussed in this forum, you could do a search to find arguments pro and con. (I tend to believe that those settings should not have been discluded from table styles.)

Table styles allow you to specify cell padding, just as in CSS, and they allow you to specify a column width, also as in CSS...

since when can you save column width into a table style ??? where ??? cell and table styles dont save anything about WIDTH or HEIGHT of columns rows or tables WHICH IS IN MY HUMBLE OPINION COMPLETE DISSASTER IN A FUNCTION THAT COULD BE A REAL HELP...

>and that the table should size itself automatically to fit the content when he put it in

Yes, I think that is exactly what he advocates. "At Least" sizes itself to the content. You couldn't have any automatic text wrap in an "at least" column though, because the column would increase width as more text was inserted.

>Peter S., I think you may be off track a bit.

I think so too. I took it to mean that you might have a large table, say 6 columns just for fun, and that within the cells in any column you would have a mixture of images and descriptive text of varying lengths, some of which you might want to wrap. I further took android to mean that he wanted to be able to insert a table, with no parameters given other than the row and column counts, and that the table should size itself automatically to fit the content when he put it in, say by pasting from the clipboard.

I'm guessing now that isn't really it at all.

Peter S.