RoboHelp 7 to 9 : Table Cell Padding

[lillibetUK]

HI All,

I very recently upgraded from TCS 1.3 with RoboHelp 7 to TCS 3.5 with RoboHelp 9. Yeay! All is good so far except one little niggle. . .

I use tables frequently in my source files to set out information. In RH7 I did this through Table > Insert > Table... Select number of rows and columns then click OK.

When I did this I could see that RH had automatically added padding to the table cells. If I added text into the cell there was a small gap between the table border and start of the text.

When I perform the same action in RH9, the padding appears to be missing (highlight a table cell and skip over to HTML view). I can't figure out how to add this automatically.It could get a little tiresome if I have to add it for each table cell from now on in order to be consistent with the tables already in my project. Manually adding a margin from the Table properties dialog appears to make no difference. Even when I set the margin to be outrageously huge, my text still butts right up against the table border.

So, does anyone know how I can set my table cells to automatically have the same padding  as they did in RH7?

Any ideas or help are welcomed. Thanks guys!

Lil

[Peter Grainge]

See if this helps.

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/902004

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[lillibetUK]

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction Peter.

Apologies for being in the wrong forum. Is it possible to move this topic over to the RoboHelp HTML forum?

Presumably, after reading the Table Styles topic in the help as well as your tour Peter, my existing tables stay as is unless I apply a table style to them but I have to create a style for any new tables I add into my project files?

You don't mention in your tour Peter whether the mapping issue across to printed documentation has now been fixed in RH9?

Having attempted to create a table style, I'm now trying to work out why if I choose to apply formatting to the 'Whole Table' and set the borders to 'Solid', '1px', 'All Borders' and 'Silver', I get an outline around the whole table rather than all cells bordered. Confused?!!

[Peter Grainge]

Presumably, after reading the Table Styles topic in the help as well as your tour Peter, my existing tables stay as is unless I apply a table style to them but I have to create a style for any new tables I add into my project files?

Yes to all questions. At some point it may be worth converting your inline tables to CSS though so that future changes are just at CSS level.

You don't mention in your tour Peter whether the mapping issue across to printed documentation has now been fixed in RH9?

If you mean what I think you do, not that is still an issue.

Having attempted to create a table style, I'm now trying to work out why if I choose to apply formatting to the 'Whole Table' and set the borders to 'Solid', '1px', 'All Borders' and 'Silver', I get an outline around the whole table rather than all cells bordered. Confused?!!

The table editor is a nightmare. Whole table means the outer borders, not the whole table, as one might reasonably expect. I think the trick is to set borders for odd rows as top left and even rows as bottom right, something like that.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[lillibetUK]

Thanks again Peter. My confusion behind the 'Whole Table' stemmed from the help text in the dialog itself which describes this as 'Applies default formatting to all cells of table'. Hence I expected my silver 1 px border would be applied to all cells, not just around the outside of the table. A good example of a bad user instruction!

I've spent over 3 hours using the perverse logic behind the Table Styles Editor. All I want is a simple grid with silver 1px borders around each cell, and 10px padding left and right of each cell. No fancy shading. I thought this simple grid would be easy to set up, but apparently not.

I thought I'd managed to achieve it but I discovered that when you choose to insert a silver 1px border for 'Top Left', it also applies a Table border along the top and left-hand side of the table. This essentially doubles up the border so it appears bigger than elsewhere in the table. This is not what I want. If I remove the Table border (Edit Table Styles dialog : Format > Borders and Shading > None), it also removes the border I applied for 'Top Left'. This is driving me nuts!

I then tried applying the border to the left of 'First Column' that seemed to work OK. However when I then applied borders to the top and bottom of 'First Row', all of the borders I had applied to the odd and even columns disappeared in the first row.

Sadly it's looking like the only viable solution for me is to copy and paste an existing table I created in RH7. If new functionality is inflicted on us when we upgrade, why can it not be more intuitive or have better explanation how to use it in the help file?

After the initial excitement of upgrading to TCS 3.5, I'm far from being a happy camper at the moment.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Please take the time to add a correction to the help doc - it benefits us all when updates are issued.

[Peter Grainge]

Send me a RoboHelp project with one topic that contains your old style table and has the CSS you will be using. See my contact page and send via one of the sites suggested. Include a link to this thread.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[lillibetUK]

Thanks Peter. Have just done this (hopefully correctly!)

I added detail to the topic contained within the project. If it doesn't make sense then please let me know.

For everyone else's benefit, I ended up hacking the stylesheet after several hours of getting nowhere with the Table Styles Editor. I obtained a better result but it's still not perfect.

Lil