Unwanted breaks in merged table rows

[jlemon01]

I have a rather large table that uses merged rows (please see attached screen shot).
This was a FrameMaker file that I imported into Flare 5.01. My output is PDF.
A similar table is working fine.

There is ample room on the previous page to accommodate the merged cells, but the table keeps breaking, as shown.
The problem is not only the break, but how the text in the far right column moves into the adjacent cells.

So far, I've done the following:
1. I've added the following <tr> and <td> tags to my main css:

tr {
page-break-inside: avoid;
page-break-before: auto;
}

td {
page-break-inside: avoid;
}

2. I've added a "page-break-inside: avoid;" line to each .body row style in my table .css.

3. I've purged the table of all formatting. I then reapplied the table style, and internal p. style.

4. My target Stylesheet Medium is "print".

And I still can't get this table behave properly in print format.

I've spent enough time on this that I could have re-created the table from scratch (several times), but my own stubbornness and persistence is telling me I'm overlooking something simple. On the other hand, there have been enough posts about troublesome tables, that maybe that's just the way Flare is sometimes, and I should re-create the table.

Any ideas?

As always, thank you in advance.

-John

[Nita Beck]

I'm not sure I can pinpoint your exact problem, but my experience with Flare is that it does not handle merged cell well in tables that came in from elsewhere, in my case, Word. Sometimes I see blank cells or blank rows; other times I see merging mishaps and issues with the borders.

I just ran a little experiment with one of my Word-imported tables that is exhibiting problems with merged cells. First, I created a new row above the row that has the merged cells problem. I then merged in the new row the same three cells that I want to be merged in the row with the problem. Then I looked at the code; I noticed that the new row with the correctly merging cells has two cells in it, with the second cell having a "colspan=3" attribute in it, which is what makes them "merged". Here's what the whole row's code looks like:

Code: Select all

<tr>
   <td class="WithBorder_BGColor1">
      <p class="TableBody">stuff here</p>
   </td>
   <td class="WithBorder_BGColor1" colspan="3">
      <p class="TableBody">stuff here</p>
   </td>
</tr>

When I compared this to the row that is misbehaving, I saw that it has two cells too, but the second cell, which is supposed to be the merged cells, doesn't have that "colspan=3" attribute. It looks like:

Code: Select all

<tr>
   <td class="WithBorder_BGColor1">
      <p class="TableBody">stuff here</p>
   </td>
   <td class="WithBorder_BGColor1">
      <p class="TableBody">stuff here</p>
   </td>
</tr>

By manually adding "colspan=3" to that row's second cell, I fixed the problem.

Hope this helps; sorry if it doesn't.