Adding a space at edges of table ruling

[DSchneeberg]

My company has requested a new template of table to use where the outside edges of the table is a thin black line, and the rows are separated by a thin black line. However, the rulings for the rows should stop short of intersecting with the outside edges of the table. Is there a way to implement this in Framemaker without a cumbersome workaround?

[Bob_Niland · Accepted solution]

A quick hack would be to add an extra top&bottom row, left&right row, that have [None] internal ruling. Apply ruling&shading to make the empty gutter around the content cells, and use various techniques to set the height of the empty rows and width of the empty columns.

You can also put a Table (with no outside borders) in a Text Frame in an Anchored Frame, with the AF providing the gapped outside border. This, and other hacks, would require some testing to ensure that it flows as intended to all output formats.

… and then the art director will ask for rounded corners …

[Barb Binder]

Two clever ideas, Bob!

~Barb

[DSchneeberg]

Those are some great workarounds, thank you! It's too bad there isn't an optoin with a bit more simplicity baked in, but oh well.

[Bob_Niland]

The first hack might be saved as a Style.

FM's table features were near state-of-the-art when first introduced, but they haven't kept up with developments. And frankly, there's a limit to how much to burden a DTP app with a lot of the spreadsheet-inspired features that people might like in Tables.

Even a decade ago, I was often doing complex tables by exporting the table from the spreadsheet (as EPS then), and importing into FM. Today I'd use PDF (where the published path is PDF or print), or maybe SVG (which has a better chance of publishing to HTML untrashed).