Tables and table borders - doubling up.

[nickatwork]

Hi all,
So I have quite a few tables in my output (WebHelp and PDF). I am NOT using table stylesheets as they haven't been able to meet all the needs I have with my tables. Thats another story really.

Anyway, I have table styles, <td> <tr> for all of my tables. I have borders set in all of these and I'm noticing an issue in PDF output.
The table borders are essentially doubling up, I under stand why they are. For example a <td> with full borders, and then a <tr> with full borders would mean that there are 2 sets of borders right next to each other. In WebHelp, this isnt the case - I only get a single pixel border, where as in PDF I end up with a 2 or maybe 3 px border as there is the td, tr and table border being applied.

Is there any way around this? I dont want to make more td tr styles, I just want to avoid this doubling as the borders are really thick in printed PDFs. I just want a table with all cells to have a 1px border.

Any tips?

Thanks, Nick

[Andrew]

You should be able to avoid this effect using the border-collapse property (set it to "collapse").

[sirsi]

Did border collapse work for you? I've had the same problem as the original poster, but the border collapse property doesn't seem to work consistently in PDFs. I have borders set to collapse in the TableStyle sheet I'm using, and also under the table element in the project's master stylesheet, but some borders are still 2 px wide.

For example, in the screenshot below, the borders of cell (2, 5) and the bottom border of cell (2, 2) are thicker than the other borders in the table. This happens in nearly every table Flare creates in PDF output, and I can't figure out why. The only pattern I've seen in the thicker borders is that the bottom right cell always has thick interior borders; the others seem random.

[whunter]

I have this issue with my tables in PDF. It appears to be a display-only issue -- that is, if you print the page, the table borders all look fine and equal.

I reported to MadCap a while ago and they logged a bug. To my knowledge it has yet to be fixed.

[nickatwork]

Yeah I never figured out a work around to this in PDF, printed the borders look fine but viewing in acrobat etc shows double lines like the screenshot above. Its a little annoying as it seems really random in where it shows up and everytime someone looks at a PDF on their screen they notice the weird thickness of the lines. Not the end of the world but still....

[sirsi]

Yes, definitely annoying. Especially since people are more likely to look at our doc on their screens than to look at it on a page. It's good to know they're at least aware of it, though.

[wbrisett]

Just as an FYI. We also see this problem in Webworks PDF output, so it's not exclusive to Flare. If you zoom at a high percentage, then the borders all look correct. It is annoying.

Wayne

[whunter]

OMG. I just upgraded to Flare 8, generated one of my PDFs, and this issue is GONE. Words cannot express how happy this makes me.