How to apply shading to a table cell?

[Centauri27]

This may be a simple question, but I can't seem to get it to work in Flare: how do I apply background shading to a table cell?

When we migrated to Flare, we imported our old RoboHelp projects. Our tables are simple: plain body cells, with the table heading row having a 50% grey pattern. The RH tables migrated over properly (for the most part), shading and all. But some tables need to be recreated and when I create new tables in Flare, I can't find out how to apply shading to to my table headings. I created a new style called "th.cell_head" and changed the "background-color" attribute to #d3d3d3 (50% grey). This looks fine in the editor, but when I preview the topic, the shading is not shown. It doesn't show either in my compiled WebHelp. I tried creating a paragraph style called "p.cellbold" and then applying the shading to attribute "background-color". This resulted in only the cell text being shaded, not the cell itself.

Can anyone help me? Such a seemingly simple task, but I've wasted so much time running around in circles.

Many thanks.
Carl

[DocuWil]

Hi Carl,

I use it often and have no problems.
Therefore a stupid question, but ..... if you insert your table (which you created with your table style) did you set the "number of heading rows" in the tab Basic?
That's what happened to me one time.

[dwag]

Not sure whether it's what you're looking for, because it sounds as though you've done pretty much the same thing by a different route, but have you tried clicking the Table bar in the left margin of the XML Editor, navigating to Table Style > Edit Style, selecting the Header tab, selecting the Background shading you want and clicking Save?

Again, not sure whether you've tried it, but when I follow the steps above, the shaded header appears in the Editor and in the preview.

[Centauri27]

DocuWil: That's exactly what I needed--thanks! I had totally forgotten about setting a table heading row. I recall stumbling across that when I first started using Flare and struggling with the tables.

dwag: Thanks for the tip, but I think I already tried this and it didn't work for me. Flare's adherence to CSS standards for table handling sure makes things confusing. It almost makes me long for the more table-friendly commands in RoboHelp X5...