Flare 7.1 and PDF: not satisfied with tables

[wilma]

Hi to eveyone,
I came out to post this message after having tried a lot of suggestions (really a lot) in this helpful forum and lost a big amount of hours (unfortunately).

At the end I've downloaded Flare 7 and resetted all my tabels in this way:
- four table stylesheets to define borders
- table, ht,hd and so on, left as "default"
- all the tables put manually in the XML Editor as "fit to content" (to have just the big tables reaching the right page border)

In this way the PDF it's ok, but..not for these kind of tables:
- tables with images
- tables with nested tables
- tables with some p.Note that has a small image in front of it
- tables with a snippet inside that has an arrow image ("-> See also chapter:")
- tables with a code lines without spaces (ex.: "c:\user\XYDireBest\Bin\project\Files")

the only way I found is to "force" some colums width of each of these tables, in order to have them do not overflow the right margin.

I've tried variuos trick, such as max_width, but no one worked.

I want to be sure I'm on the right way: I'm a +15 years Robohelp user and I'm moving to Flare, but having the XML Editor that gives you just an "approximation" of what you see in PDF, it's terrible.

And maybe I've not the right level of knowledge in order to "tune" the various properties of tables, styles and so on?

Thank you,
Vilma

err Flare table.png

[cbdebris]

Vilma,

You may need to analyze your tables. It may be that you need more table styles for situations when you have images, etc.

[wilma]

Thank you Debris,
for that manual we solved forcing some column width in that cases where inside the column you have an element that cannot be "compressed" souch long command strings (es.: "c:/xxxx/xxxxxx/yyyy/wwwww), or images, and in this way is quite satisfacting. My worry is about long manuals... my impression is still that not always we can "drive" the behavious of the PDF working on styles...and it's a pity.

[cbdebris]

Vilma, you may be right.

We had to define rules for what could and could not be added to tables so that we did not require numerous styles. We also put max-width and other items in our core stylesheet, not the table stylesheet, so that we had more control.

You may find that a combination of individual table stylesheets, plus some fundamental settings in the core stylesheet, will help ease your workload. Good luck.