Indesign Secrets

E.R. wrote: After seeing your corner-only border segment, it reminded me of a problem that I hadn’t been able to solve: I want to make the right- and left-hand side of the text frame a square bracket so that anything I typed into it would elongate the brackets as I typed. Alas, I’ve never found a solution.

I banged on this problem for a bit, too, and was about to give up when Sander Pinkse from the Netherlands sent me the answer from out of the blue. Not only that, but he showed how to make a rounded-corner table (sort of), which many people have also requested!

Let’s do the brackets first…

Christopher wrote: Do you know how to sort data in a table? From time to time, we need to change around the data in our tables. I always end up manually re-alphabetizing. But I wish I could find a way to sort it like you can in Excel.

Pariah Burke wrote a really good article in the last issue of InDesign Magazine in which he talked about this very thing. I would encourage you to get that article and read it through. But the quick answer is: There’s really no good way to do this, but there are two mediocre ways…

Bonnie asked:

Can you insert a photo inside a table that will be centered within the cell on InDesign?

You know, if there’s one question I hate, it’s… well, I guess it’s pretty much any question about putting graphics inside table cells. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the question — it’s a good question! It’s that the answer will invariably include the phrase, “You’re not going to like this….”

Doug wrote:

I have a table with two top rows with 6 columns, and the 4 lower rows with only 4 columns. When I select the two top rows and tell them to ‘distribute columns evenly’ it does it, but when I then select the 4 lower rows and do the same thing, it pulls the columns above out of wack. Even when I go into ‘cell properties’ and tell each column to be exactly 1/6 or 1/4 the width of the table, it does the same thing. All I want is a single table with two seperate column numbers evenly spaced within the table.

We’ve gotten a few people with similar requests recently. Must be something tabular in the air. I know exactly what you mean: It seems like this should be so simple!…

DM wrote: How do you move a row in a table to a different location? For example, move the 4th row to the 7th position. Drag and drop doesn’t work. A copy and paste creates a table-inside-a-cell effect.

You’ve discovered one of the weaknesses in InDesign’s tables feature. There is no “move row” feature. (There is, however, a “go to row” feature under the Table menu that most people don’t notice. It allows you go jump to the 4th row, or the 405th row, quickly. Perhaps it’ll be an obscure feature of the week-eek-eek sometime in a future podcast.)

Anyway, moving one row to another ends up being a bit of a hassle. The best method is copy and paste, but as you noticed…

This is the last installment in the back-to-basics-and-on-to-advanced “Tab Leaders” series. If you’ve been following the series, we began by inserting tabs and dot leaders in columnar text (Part 1); moved on to formatting tab leaders differently than the text they separate (Part 2); created in-line, fill-in-the-blank-style tab spaces (Part 3); used the automated formatting […]

I’m up to the section in my book (InDesign CS3 Visual Quickstart) where I talk about the new feature for Table and Cell styles. I think someone has left something out of the whole paradigm.
The stroke settings for Table styles follow the same workflow for Table attributes and only allow you to control the stroke […]

I asked our contributors for one or two good little tips. Here’s what they came up with today:

Pariah S. Burke: Would you agree or disagree with the following statement: Ruler guides are always cyan or blue. If you agreed, you’d be (happily) in error. If all you…

Books wrote: Is it possible to split a table into two seperate tables in order to change the setup? Or is it that once I created only one table I can’t undo it? I tried finding a break charecter with no luck.

Last year we looked at how to merge two tables together, but you bring up a good point: What if we want to split a table into two or more pieces? It seems like there should be some command to do this, but there isn’t. Instead, we again turn to…

Two attributes of table cells have a long history in the web design field: “cellpadding” (equivalent to InDesign’s “cell inset” or “text frame inset”) and “cellspacing,” which is the amount of space in between the cells. This HTML Code Tutorial page has a decent explanation of the two, with illustrations.

As far as I know, no page layout program with a Table function has a cell spacing feature, including InDesign. So whenever I hear someone ask