Participant

Question

Is there a way to "autofit" an InDesign table's columns to fit their content?

Forum|Forum|16 years ago
September 29, 2009
17 replies
68468 views

Am I being dense about this? I've looked through all the help documentation, searched online in various forums, blogs, etc...I can't find anything about being able to autofit a table's column to fit its content.

This type of thing is a piece of cake in Excel...just double-click the border between the cells and it'll autofit.

But, in InDesign (as far as I can tell), it's an entirely manual process involving zooming in and manually adjusting the borders between cells until the red table cell overflow circle goes away.

Not fun when you have a half dozen tables on a single page...and then eight additional pages with similar numbers of tables.

Is there any solution to doing this? A script? A plugin? The next version (whenever it comes out)? Something else?

Thanks in advance for any help,

Doug Thompson

Manager of Web and Electronic Communications

Ohio Wesleyan University

How to

Show previous replies

J

jmurdsh

Participant

What works for me is:

Select the cells
Go to Table > Cell Options > Text...
Choose Rows and Columns
Set Row Height to "At Least" then fill in a height that is smaller than the minimum height you know you need.

Then the rows will adjust to fit your content.

R

rcoda1

Inspiring

columns, not rows.

R

rcoda1

Inspiring

We used to be able to do this with a Quadex 5000 Typesetter way back in the 1980s... tabs (for tabular work, or as we call them today, tables) were based on the longest line in each column, with specified left/right column margins. I would think that in 2017, the programmers we have today should "at least" be able to duplicate this functionality.

Steve Werner

Community Expert

Unless you personally add your request for that feature, the product managers will never know. There are literally requests for thousands of different "must have" features in the queue. It's a little like an election: Make your vote count.

Feature Requests/Bug Reports

brianc49423945

Participant

7 years on....

Has InDesign addressed the issue of "autofit" for table columns?

If not, why? (I will have to explain this to Managers who are forking out for the dozen Adobe Suite liceneces and can see our PIMs exporting with "autofit" and InDesign not doing it.)

Many Thanks

L

Laubender

Community Expert

Hello Brian,
what would you exactly expect from "autofit" for table columns?

As far as I know, Microsoft never introduced hyphenation for contents in Excel cells and I'd like to know what "fit" should exactly do when "hyphenation" is on or off. If you are searching the web for scripts regarding InDesign tables, there should be something available, that would come close what Excel is doing with "fit" to text width.

Or are you after a function, that would minimize white space in tables and give an optimal table length and is able to balance the width of the columns? There can be found some script snippets in the InDesign Scripting forum that try to accomplish this. Though, they are not "auto" in the sense, that every time you change the contents of a cell somewhere in the table, the column width of all columns will be adjusted…

And to answer your question more directly:

No. Nothing has changed with InDesign the last years when it comes to "autofit" for table columns.

Uwe

brianc49423945

Participant

Hi Uwe,

I've attached a screenshot of what we are looking at below. The first column clearly has whitespace.

I should add at this point we are generating this all through the EasyCatalog plugin, which is generating a 1000 pages for our catalogue. So the tables have dynamic content. Empty columns are deleted automatically.

What we would like is that the table column "autofits" to the width of the text.. Even if that means the table would possibly extend further off the page. At least we would be able to look at the data and how it is formatted and look at solutions. As it stands with InDesign, it offers no way of resizing table columns to content, and we have no real idea what criteria it is using.

I'm a little surprised that autofit has not been implemented yet within the Program itself.

I've created some scripts in the past to automate many parts of InDesign and EasyCatalog. So do you think that is the only option at the moment Uwe?

P

Peter Kahrel

Community Expert

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Peter Spier

Community Expert

Peter,

I see a link in your email post, but it isn't there on the web page. Did you edit?

Harbs.

Legend

It came through to email. Odd...

Here's the link: Page 62 in http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596802523/

I just checked in my copy. Yes, a full script is there (as well as some other very useful table scripts). I think Peter's book is worth the price of admission for this script alone! (Not to mention it being an excellent source for anyone who wants to learn about scripting!)

Harbs

Harbs.

Legend

It should be pretty easy to script. I personally don't do a lot of

table work, but if you'd like to explain me exactly what you need, I

can see if I can help.

You can send me a PM if you'd like.

Harbs

http://www.in-tools.com

Innovations in Automation

D

dethompsowuAuthor

Participant

Good to know that (a) I'm not going crazy and there isn't a built-in way to easily do what I originally asked...and (b) that I'm not alone in wanting this kind of capability.

Thanks,

E

Eugene Tyson

Community Expert

Afraid not.

What I do is select a common row and that will give you the width. Then I copy the width of the row size. In other tables of the same layout I paste this number into the row width.

Height is easy enough, select the whole table, set it to be exactly 1.5mm then select the EXACTLY option and it all auto fits into the right sized rows.

But column width is different. The only way I've found is to copy the row width as said above.

OR draw guides where you want the table widths to be, that works as you can just snap the cursor to the guide, you're done in a snap.

Tables are pretty weak in InDesign.

P

peter minneapolis

Participating Frequently

Eugene Tyson wrote:
Afraid not.
What I do is select a common row and that will give you the width. Then I copy the width of the row size. In other tables of the same layout I paste this number into the row width.
Height is easy enough, select the whole table, set it to be exactly 1.5mm then select the EXACTLY option and it all auto fits into the right sized rows.
But column width is different. The only way I've found is to copy the row width as said above.
OR draw guides where you want the table widths to be, that works as you can just snap the cursor to the guide, you're done in a snap.
Tables are pretty weak in InDesign.

Add your request to many others at:

https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform

Regards,

Peter

_______________________

Peter Gold

KnowHow ProServices

E

Eugene Tyson

Community Expert

Oh I've been there Peter.

I have many requests logged with Adobe.

Even simple calculations for tables would be nice.

Tables could be so much easier than they are now.

You can't even go from Cell Options to Table Options dialog box, two sep short cuts to get there. Frustrating.

Even for doing accounting books, like annual reports, a simple double underline button, or single underline button or something. It's so petty using tables it takes an age to do a book that contains mainly tables.

Perhaps they need a new plugin/application just for doing tables, like an excel type program that you link your files from?

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