Tables Overview

Term	Description
table	A collection of grids, rows, columns, cells, and borders.
grid	A grouped collection of rows. The OASIS Exchange table model support multiple grids per table. The other table models support only one grid.
cell	An individual box within a grid or table.
row	A single horizontal set of cells covering the entire width of the grid or table.
column	A single vertical set of cells covering the entire height of the grid or table. Not applicable to custom tables.
border	One of the four lines that surrounds the table or an individual cell.
table rulers	The rulers and table selection tools that appear in the Edit view.
span	Combine a rectangular selection of cells. Not applicable to custom tables.
unspan	Return a spanned selection of cells to the original configuration. All of the text in the unspanned cells will be displayed in the upper left cell. Not applicable to custom tables.

Borders are the graphical lines that surround both the table itself and each individual cell. The borders between cells are shared. You can use the Modify Borders dialog box to control how borders are displayed. In the dialog box, you can change borders for either the entire table, a selected set of cells, or an individual cell.

For OASIS Exchange, HTML, and custom tables, you can change the style, color, and width of the borders. These changes are saved as processing instructions, which are typically not compatible with other XML editors. Use the set tableuiextensions command to prevent format settings from being saved as processing instructions.

For tables that span page boundaries, header rows print at the top of each page and footer rows print at the bottom of each page. Text in header rows is automatically converted to bold.

According to the OASIS Exchange and HTML table models, header rows must be at the top of the table and footer rows must occur directly after them. When you convert body rows to header or footer rows, they will be moved to the top of the table and placed with the other header and footer rows.

The CALS tfoot element is not a part of the OASIS Exchange specification. If you are planning on using your documents in a strict OASIS Exchange environment, you should not use footer rows in your tables.

In HTML tables, when you convert a body row to a header or footer row, the content of the row is automatically moved from within the tbody element to within the thead or tfoot element, respectively. If you prefer to change the table data cell element (td) to a table header cell element (th), choose Edit > Change Markup.

If working with the OASIS Exchange table model, you can specify that cell content be rotated by 90, 180 or 270 degrees. Use the rotate attribute for a cell, with values of 1, 2 or 3 to achieve rotation.

◦ For tables that contain at least one proportional width column, the table width is controlled by the Display Width setting on the Table Properties dialog box. The Display Width defaults to 100% of the view width.

In OASIS Exchange tables, changes to display width are saved as processing instructions, which are typically not compatible with other XML editors. Use the set tableuiextensions command to prevent format settings from being saved as processing instructions.

In custom tables, the table width is fixed and cannot be changed.

Column widths in the Editor view can be either proportional, based on the overall table width, or fixed, based on the Size setting in the Table Properties dialog box. The available fixed width units are: inches, centimeters, millimeters, points, picas, and pixels.

In OASIS Exchange tables, each column can be specified in different units of measure, resulting in tables that can contain a mixture of fixed width columns and proportional width columns.

In HTML tables, the cell element’s deprecated width attribute can be used to control cell width independently of column width. Arbortext Editor interprets any value for this attribute as specifying an overriding width for the column in which the cell resides. If multiple cells in a column have conflicting widths, the largest value is used for the entire column.

For cells that span columns, Arbortext Editor interprets the width attribute as specifying the column width for the column in which the (horizontally) spanned cell begins. Be aware that some browsers may use the cell width to determine the minimum width of the resulting spanned cell.

Row height is set to Natural by default. The height of each row will adjust to fit the content in the tallest cell. You can set a Fixed height for a row that will cause the row to appear at a specific height in published output. In the Editor window, fixed height rows are indicated by a two headed arrow in the row ruler that indicates the height of the row. If a row's natural height becomes greater than the specified Fixed height in the Editor window, the row will grow beyond the fixed height but the arrow in the row ruler turns red and continues to indicate the fixed height. Note that this does not necessarily mean that the content of the row will exceed the fixed height when the table is published. It just means that the content is too long for the row height in the Editor window.

In OASIS Exchange tables, fixed row heights are saved as processing instructions, which are typically not compatible with other XML editors. Use the set tableuiextensions command to prevent format settings from being saved as processing instructions.

Tables can be displayed in either tagged or graphical view. The View > Tables > Table Markup menu option controls this view. When tables are viewed as markup, you can edit the individual table tags directly. With the table markup turned off, tables are displayed graphically and you can edit the cell content and table structure more easily.

Arbortext Editor supports three pre-defined table models for authoring in the Arbortext Editor table editor. These include an Arbortext table model, and two table models based on industry standards: HTML and OASIS Exchange (derived from the CALS standard).

If you are using a DTD, the entity declarations that define the pre-defined table models are located in the \entities folder of your installation directory. The entities are listed in the following table. The Model Name column lists the table model that works with the declaration file.

Entity File	Model Name	Description
ati-tbl.elm	Arbortext	Declarations for the Arbortext table model.
cals-tbl.elm	OASIS Exchange	Declarations for the Arbortext subset of the CALS table model. This entity file is provided for backward-compatibility only. New document types should use either the OASIS Exchange table model or the HTML table model.
calstbl2.dtd	OASIS Exchange	This is an extension to the OASIS Exchange table model.
soex-tbl.dtd	OASIS Exchange	OASIS Exchange table model.
html-tbl.dtd	HTML	Declarations for the HTML 4.1 Transitional table model (for SGML documents).
xhtml-tbl.dtd	HTML	Declarations for the XHTML 1.0 Transitional table model (for XML documents).

Arbortext Editor supports the display and editing of custom tables defined from elements in a DTD or schema. A custom table model can be configured by identifying elements in a document type that should be displayed and edited as a table. The elements can be output as a table or styled in another format.

Custom tables are configured in the document type configuration file, .dcf file, or Arbortext Styler stylesheet. See Defining custom tables for more information on defining a custom table in the .dcf file. For information on configuring a custom table with Arbortext Styler, see Styling custom tables.

If you have multiple table models declared in your DTD or schema, you can configure Arbortext Editor to display a prompt that enables users to select the table model they want to insert. Arbortext Editor displays this prompt when the set prompttablemodels command is set to on.