How to stop table cells from breaking at a page break?

[mcondron]

In MS-Word output, Flare is breaking the contents of table cells at page breaks. This is an intra-cell break, so that part of the cell text is at the bottom of page N and the rest of the cell is at the top of page N+1.

I don't have a problem with breaking the table (it's pretty long) but I would rather have the contents of individual cells kept together.

Is there any way to prevent this from happening and force table breaks to only happen on cell boundaries and not within cells?

[mcondron]

I have also found one place where the table breaks with only the header row at the bottom of page N, then the header plus table data at the top of page N+1.

[Graham Campbell]

I had a similar problem with my printed output and have found the print support CSS2 markup to be useful.

page-break-after or page-break-before have both proven useful to me in ensuring tables are broken at the row boundary, and not in the middle of the row, or even in the middle of a sentence!

For full details on these attributes, I'll point you to the same website I used for this:

http://www.eskimo.com/~bloo/indexdot/cs ... bafter.htm.

Hope that helps you.

[NJ]

I am facing the same issue as both of you and I had a look to the print support CSS2 markup.

I am afraid I did not understand very well how to "handle" page-break-after or page-break-before to ensure the cells not to be broken in the middle. This doesn't work for me. Can anyone help me ?

I also read that it was advised not to include theses values in table elements. Isn't there any other solution ?

Thanks in advance for your help !

[MaryM]

Still looking for a remedy for this problem of tables breaking awkwardly in printed output (PDF) in Flare 6!! Any help out there?

[lacastle]

Have you tried the page break before/after with the <td> style?

[Andrew]

Still looking for a remedy for this problem of tables breaking awkwardly in printed output (PDF) in Flare 6!! Any help out there?

Yep, there is, and luckily, it's pretty easy to implement. You need to set the page-break-inside property to "avoid" in the stylesheet. To do so:

1. Open your stylesheet in Flare's Stylesheet Editor (find the stylesheet in the Content Explorer and double-click it).
2. In the drop-down menu at the top left, select Show Table Styles.
3. If you use a print medium (rather than default), make sure you set the Medium drop-down menu to your print medium.
4. In the top right drop-down menu, select Show Property Groups.
5. In the Styles panel, select the "tr" element (tr is the table row element).
6. Expand the PrintSupport group.
7. In the page-break-inside property, select the "avoid" value.
8. Save the stylesheet.

Your table rows will no longer break across pages.

[Andrew]

I'll try to answer some of the other old questions in this thread, in case someone else searches and finds this post.

In MS-Word output, Flare is breaking the contents of table cells at page breaks. This is an intra-cell break, so that part of the cell text is at the bottom of page N and the rest of the cell is at the top of page N+1.

I don't have a problem with breaking the table (it's pretty long) but I would rather have the contents of individual cells kept together.

Is there any way to prevent this from happening and force table breaks to only happen on cell boundaries and not within cells?

I believe that MS Word output does not support the method I described above; the only way to prevent Word tables from breaking across rows is to do post-processing in Word (by setting the table row properties to not allow rows to break across pages). You can probably create a macro to do this, though I've never tried, as I do not use Word output for anything except content reviews.

I have also found one place where the table breaks with only the header row at the bottom of page N, then the header plus table data at the top of page N+1.

I believe this is because there is enough room for the header row to display, but not enough for the next row. Since Flare sets tables to repeat the header at the top of a new page, you get a header row at the bottom of one page, and the top of the next. On way to deal with this is to simply add a paragraph before that table, but that's ugly if the length of content before the table changes. I can't think of a better way offhand, unfortunately.

[MaryM]

Thanks for the suggestions. So far, I've only seen partial success. Some tables look better, but the problem tables, those with merged cells - across rows, rather than columns are still misbehaving. In one instance the content actually changes the column its assigned to after a page break, i.e. it appears in the merged column after a page break! Uhg.
Do I have to break up all the tables with merged cells?
Thanks again for your help Andrew and Laura.

[Andrew]

Yuck -- that doesn't sound fun. I don't use any tables with merges across rows in my documentation, so I don't have any tried-and-true solution. However, were it me, I would try to do the same thing I told you about above, but use the element "td" instead of "tr" -- that might force it to not break columns across pages. If you try it, let us know how it goes!

[helseykc]

Thanks for the suggestions. So far, I've only seen partial success. Some tables look better, but the problem tables, those with merged cells - across rows, rather than columns are still misbehaving. In one instance the content actually changes the column its assigned to after a page break, i.e. it appears in the merged column after a page break! Uhg.
Do I have to break up all the tables with merged cells?
Thanks again for your help Andrew and Laura.

Hi,

I'm having the same problem as MaryM - I have merged cells in my first column, merging over a few rows. Page breaks appear where I don't want them to and the remainder of the rows' content is moved over into the empty (merged cell)... Any progress anyone?

Thanks in advance...