Making a Vertical Bar in a Table (without using tables)
Gregory wrote:
Is there a simple way to create vertical rules in the same place as my tab stops? Is this something that can be done with Nested Style?
Look, I would argue that this is what tables are for — and InDesign’s tables feature is very powerful. But every now and again, you may want a table with vertical rules and such, but without using the tables feature. For example, if I were creating a directory with several thousand names, I’d likely look for a non-table route. I’m sure tables would work, but I just don’t like the idea of creating a single table with a thousand rows. The idea freaks me out.
So, what to do. How to get those vertical lines (other than printing the whole thing out and using Format line tape or a rapidograph pen… remember those?)
Here’s one solution: Find all the tabs and replace them with tab, vertical bar, then tab. The vertical bar (sometimes called pipe) shows up in most fonts, but it’s not tall enough. More on that in a minute.
The next step is to set additional tab stops for the paragraph: One tab stop for the bar, and another for where the text should go. Note that the horizontal bars in this image are handled with the Rule Below feature.
Now you need to apply a character style to each of those bars to make them taller (and perhaps thinner or thicker, depending on the horizontal line). Here’s the character style I made:
You don’t want to apply that character style manually, or even with a find/change. No, you want to define your paragraph styles to apply it automatically. That’s a perfect case for nested styles:
Note that I use the Repeat feature so that the “tall bar” style is applied to all the vertical bars, no matter how many there are in the paragraph. That should do it! Here’s the final result, zoomed in a bit:
Look, I’m not going to tell you this isn’t a kludge. Of course it is. There are probably some fonts with which this won’t work well, and you certainly need to be careful that the lines actually connect (zoom way in, print proofs, and all that). But drastic documents call for drastic workarounds, and this one is relatively easy and straightforward.
 |
Brilliant! I was already using (slightly) lengthened pipes in combination with underscores to create 3-sided, 4-celled boxes (set of 4, of course) for forms where people enter their credit card numbers, but this just takes it a step further.
I’m having a ‘dead-and-gone’ ceremony for my set of Rapidographs this weekend, if anyone wants to come along and join in the fun. ;)
I needed something similar once, but with a square instead of a vertical bar. I used the underline feature along with some white space (I don’t recall which).
Would it be possible to use an anchored line and/or the typefi plugin to auto size the line?
Hats off to the above solution though. If I’d had that information back in Quark or the tableless days it would have been awesome.
But I do remember opening up one of my very first InDesign jobs and I didn’t use tables then, simply because I didn’t know the feature was available or how to use it correctly. Nowadays it’s tables tables tables. I can’t get over the ease-ability, flexibility and the frustration of tables. :)
Truly cool tip!
I have to admit that I still have the pens and the tapes and the t-square and the light table and the waxer, etc, etc, etc (I don’t throw anything away!).
I can see a lot of uses for this idea even though I, too, have fallen in love with tables.
Is there any way to get InDesign to let me use a cell height greater than 8.3333 inches in a table? I create a lot of very basic posters for schools and they want to list a lot of information on those things.
BTW, 1218 Rows, 10 Columns, no 2 rows having identical info…sometimes, you just have to “be bold, be brave”! That was the course listing (hand generated) that I put into last year’s High School Course Offering Guide!
I do tons of forms and I would never stray from making a table. I’ve made tables with 1,000 rows… not scary at all! Now 1,000 rows of text with a bunch of tabs in each row… that’s scary.
I would never use tabs instead of tables. My forms are frequently being revised. I just had one that needed to have columns 2 and 3 swapped. With tabs, I probably would have quit my job on the spot and went back to mopping floors for a living. With tables, I was finished in less than a minute.
Jennie wrote: “Is there any way to get InDesign to let me use a cell height greater than 8.3333 inches in a table? I create a lot of very basic posters for schools and they want to list a lot of information on those things.”
Yes, insert a row below, then Merge the cells, there’s a catch though, as David pointed out that merging isn’t really merging, it’s a faux merge.
Or if you don’t feel like merging then you can fake the look by removing the cell border and shift the text into place using the indents of the cells and text indents.
Well, there is no doubt that tables are very robust in InDesign. However, there is also overhead involved that I’m not sure it always worth the trouble.
I just made a 1,900 row table as tabbed text and another as a table. The tabbed text file was 1.4 Mb and the table document was 6.2 Mb. These days, that size difference doesn’t really matter much, but it does belie a basic truth: That tables require overhead.
More importantly, if you’re importing or exporting tabular data a lot, there are times that just handling it as formatted text makes more sense. Trying to get XML data into tables (or vice versa) can be a hassle, and is often easier to format it as straight tabbed text.
As for Christopher’s comment about swapping rows: Yes, that would certainly be easier with tables! (Although it could probably be done with tabbed tables using GREP.)
The maximum height of a cell is set in Table/Cell Options/Rows and Columns. Just bear in mind that InDesign won’t split a cell across frames, so be careful about making this maximum too large or you’ll end up with permanently overset text if a cell exceeds the height of your text frames.
Dave
Ah I knew I saw a setting for that somewhere, thanks for the reminder Dave. I was in Table Options and didn’t see it, thought I’d dreamed it.
I love this site!!! Thanks for letting me know about the maximum height/width location Dave! ;-)
Be Brave David!
I’ve created a “table” with 8,300+ rows over 160 pages for a university staff directory. This was necessary because of the inconsistency in the amount of info for each entry.
(Like this… import data to FileMaker; parse data; import tab-delimited data to ID; make table and select column with name or dept & change to bold font; combine with address info columns… )