Hidden Limits of Table Cell Heights
October 21st, 2006Written by David Blatner
Susie wrote:
Can I do a full depth table in A4? It seems to be limiting me to 21.1 cms
Susie, it’s easy to do a table as long as an A4 page… as long as there are more than one row. But I’m guessing you’re wanting a single row to be taller than 21.1 cms or 50 picas. That’s the maximum height of a table cell by default.
Fortunately, you can change this if you know where to look. Select the cells you want to edit with the Text tool, then choose Table > Cell Options > Text (or press Command-Option-B/Ctrl-Alt-B). Now click on the Rows and Columns tab.
Notice the Maximum value? If you increase that, your cells can be taller. Like so much in InDesign, it’s frustrating until you see it done once!
Once you find out about this feature, you find yourself wondering: why did they do that? Why have a maximum height for a cell?
The reason, it seems to me, is to provide a trade-off for where overset text might occur. Because cells can’t split at a frame boundary, if you try to pour too much text into a cell with a height set to “at least”, the cell will grow and grow until it doesn’t fit on a page (or, more accurately, doesn’t fit in a frame on a page).
At that point, the whole story containing the table from that point on would become overset. And dealing with it would be tres nasty. Unless you were quick-witted enough to realize what you’d done and so used undo, you’d be really stuck.
The story editor doesn’t help (although it might provide the necessary clue) because you can’t edit text in a cell by using the story editor — great pity of course, but them’s the breaks.
The only way out of this situation would be first to recognize you were in it — the way I described it above ought to be easy to deal with because you would at least know you were pouring text into a cell when the light went out on your story. But what if you were placing text from an outside source? And that text included a table with a cell that was too tall. That would be harder to diagnose.
Once you diagnose it — the story editor ought to be a big clue because the last thing not overset is the table symbol — how do you escape? You can’t see the cell, so even if you could maneuver your insertion point into it, it would be a crap shoot what you would be deleting to try to make it smaller.
The only way out is to realize what has happened and make the frame taller until the cell can be accommodated. Then you can edit it or split it or whatever is needed to make it a reasonable size again.
So, that’s why this odd-ball maximum height is a good thing, even though most people encountering it think it a blasted nuisance.
Dave
[…] Is this Cell Height season or something? Suddenly I’m receiving lots of requests for help in dealing with overset table cells. David is as well, as you can see from his recent post, “Hidden Limits of Table Cell Heights.” […]
Gracias - not sure if it was a default, but I had a 1″ max cell height that was driving me bonkers. Thanks to you (and Google for pointing the way), I kept my sanity for one more day.
This is great!!! I was having this problem just the other day when I was in Table Hell with a client! How simple, yet how sneaky.
Great David, needed this one several times ! Great tip ! Just as sneaky like the ‘keep’ option in this dialog window.
I’ve struggled with this for ages. Moving over from Quark has been stressful!
You Rock! So quick and easy. Good concise instructions… would never have looked there