Page break in a table?

[doc_guy]

I'm creating PDF output from a Flare 4 project and I'm wondering if anybody knows of a setting that will allow tables to break across pages? Is it in the style sheet somewhere? Because I have several tables that are more than a 1/2 page in length, and I'd like to see the table split, rather than have the entire table move to the next page.

[Gordo]

Does the table split across the page when you view the topic in Print Layout in the XML Editor?

Take a look at the page break styles that appear in the Print Support property group (page-break-after, page-break-before, and page-break-inside). I believe that by default, your tables should be appearing across page breaks. If they are not, I would suspect that you have one of these properties defined in your stylesheet. And check both mediums.

If you want the table to break across the page break, but you don't want an individual row to split, set the page-break-inside property for tr to "avoid"

--G

[doc_guy]

That advice from the guide is not very helpful... since the place I looked first was the online help, and couldn't find what I was looking for. Guess I'll head over to the styles guide.

Thanks for your help, Lisa.

[LTinker68]

Sorry, my computer was freaking out on me and I inadvertently deleted my post. I haven't looked at the Styles Guide myself, but hopefully it has the answer. My first guess was something like Gordo was suggesting where you create a custom <tr> class and set it to page break before, but that requires manual setting and eyeballing the topic to see which row to apply it to. Hopefully the Styles Guide explains some way to do it dynamically.

[Gordo]

You can avoid having to create a unique tr class for page breaks by using the "page-break-inside" property.

As Lisa points out, if you try to use "page-break-before" on a tr you would have to create a unique class of tr and manually determine which rows that class should be applied to. Otherwise, you'd have a page preak before every table row, and that's just silly. But even if you do that, if you add more content after the fact, you may need to apply that class to a different row. Or, if you condition out any content... you can see where this is going.

By setting "page-break-inside" on the tr tag to "avoid," you should never have a table row split across a page break, but your also not forcing every other table row to create page breaks. You also dont' have to worry about adding more content later, condition tags, etc.

--G

[Centauri27]

I have also encountered the same problem: I have some long tables and they break very oddly in Flare, even though I haven't made any changes to the TR and TD styles. This is what I've noticed:

- Tables in legacy topics originally created by RoboHelp actually behave as expected: the table rows break when a page break is encountered.
- Tables created using Flare's table stylesheet behave really bizarrely while in print layout: breaks seem to occur only between table rows. Only when a row exceeds the length of a page will it break within a row.
- A long row that breaks across a page causes the row immediately after to break again to the next page! For example, I have a row that takes up 1 1/2 pages. Immediately after that large row is a small one-line row. In print preview, the row spills over to the second page as expected, taking up half the page. However the tiny row after that is pushed to the next page, even though there is still half a page of empty space! Nothing I try can force that row back to the previous page where it belongs. This results in really ugly table orphans.

The reason I have such large rows is that there is material hidden under drop-down text in the row. In WebHelp, this neatly organizes everything, but it does become more ungainly when in print.

I have checked the tables style sheet and confirmed that the Print Support section for my TR and TD styles are all at their defaults. Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks.
Carl Lum

[LTinker68]

The reason I have such large rows is that there is material hidden under drop-down text in the row. In WebHelp, this neatly organizes everything, but it does become more ungainly when in print.

If you have drop-down tags then I'm guessing you have paragraph tags inside the table rows. Did you set orphan/widow values for the print version of those paragraph styles?

[Centauri27]

If you have drop-down tags then I'm guessing you have paragraph tags inside the table rows. Did you set orphan/widow values for the print version of those paragraph styles?

The paragraph style that I use within the cells--and within the drop-down tags--show "(default)" for all the "Breaks" settings. The widow and orphan settings are at the default value of '2'.

Carl

[LTinker68]

I don't know if "default" for the break settings is the same as "auto". You might try setting them to auto.

If you recreate one of the tables without using drop-down text — just have the text written out the way it out be for the print output — then do the rows in the print output break the way they should? I'm wondering if you need to set break and/or orphan/widow styles for the drop-down tags. Flare transforms the drop-downs into the regular text, but I wonder if it still looks to those tags for the print style settings. (I don't use drop-down effects so I don't know how they normally behave.)

[doc_guy]

Thanks all. I was able to solve my problem by modifying the style sheet. I had set a style back in Flare 3 and it didn't do anything back then. Now it does! And it is fixed. I had the TABLE element with a style that said "page-break-inside: avoid" I set that back to default.