Table Stroke Issues & Frustrations

Swell. Thanks for the reply, I appreciate it!

Any ‘creative’ workarounds I could do?? The biggest issue will be the bottom borders on the end of rows on each page as this happens all through the book. I can’t imagine anyone who’s ever used InD to layout a catalog with tables has not had a need to NOT have both top & bottom borders.

For the transparency gradients, these may only happen on a couple pages, so we may just fake it with a proper gradient object floating where the border should be. NOT an elegant or safe solution, but hopefully nothing would move these out of position.

Thanks!

Hi Adam,
We could fake the top border with a stroke and then get rid of it on the top rows of pages. We would just have to be very wary of any reflow as edits are made or items are added. We would probably have to do this as a very last step before making final mechanicals.

Was just hoping for something that could ‘ride’ in the flow of the table. What a frustrating little problem!

Thanks for any suggestions, though!

Hey Adam. That’s a good idea, we’ll keep it in mind. Unfortunately, the border is not 100% consistent in all instances (sometimes it spans all columns, sometimes just one, etc.). So we’d still have to override in a number of places.

I’m wondering about adding an extra ‘fake’ row in-between the pages, but in a text frame off on the pasteboard (not on page). This way, at least we could keep actual table borders, which is probably safer in regards to placement and style. I’m imagining that as long as the off-page text frame was only large enough to handle one empty row, it would just be a matter of adding these rows where needed. Still seems very kludgy, but not sure how else to do this.

Thanks!

Hi Colleen. Thanks for the creative thinking here!

Can you elaborate on what you mean by ‘drew a pathfinder/subtract shape to simulate a border’? I’m not sure I follow what you were doing here.

It appears you at first were saying you used a paragraph rule as a top border. That was my first thought, but unfortunately we decided the text needs to align to the middle of the table cell, not that top. Otherwise, that would have worked fine.

But I’m not sure how you were adding/applying the path with directional feather to the table cells, as that was the other thing we were trying to accomplish (though we may be able to let that one go if we must).

Thanks again for any & all help here!

Hi Coleen,
I really appreciate your taking the time to show the workaround ideas. The gradient in the footer would work well for that scenario, as long as the rows remained a consistent height I suppose (though I thought header/footer rows had to have same content). That’s good thinking!

Unfortunately, what we wanted to be a transparent gradient border is the top border of each cell/row.

So in your example, the borders above the item & price cells would have the gradient rules with transparency. But this is not possible to add as either a paragraph rule or as a table border, as both just use a gradient swatch which has no transparency. I thought about embedding an object in each cell, but it would have the same issue as a paragraph rule – wouldn’t work right if text doesn’t align top (and adds a lot of complexity).

To give a better idea of what we’re doing compared to your example, our ‘Item’ column has photo thumbnails, and our ‘Price’ column has all the corresponding product details. Unfortunately, the product details can vary from maybe 2-7 lines of text, depending how how verbose the client is. So there’s no way to know the offset for the top paragraph rule, as it is constantly varying. If text was top-aligned, we’d be fine and wouldn’t have these issues. But it left too much empty space at the bottom of description cells when the content was short.

Ugh, tables. So necessary sometimes, but so frustrating as well…

Thanks!