Tables

Rows that size their own columns, break their own pages and carry their heading onto the next one.

The table is the part of a document that changes most: four lines this month, forty the next. You describe the rows, and the software settles the rest — how wide each column has to be, where the table has to break, and what has to be repeated at the top of the page that follows.

Every cell can carry its own space around the text, its own border, its own background, a picture, or several rows joined into one. A cell whose text is too wide is dealt with the way you asked for, not the way the page happened to fall.

What it saves you

Forty lines is the same work as four
There is no version of the document for a short order and another for a long one. One description covers both, and the one nobody tested is the one that would have broken.
The heading follows onto every page
A reader looking at page three still knows which column is the quantity and which is the price, without turning back.
The columns fit what is actually in them
Widths are measured from the contents rather than guessed in advance, so one long article name does not leave every other column cramped for the rest of the document.

See it done

Every one of these is a real PDF this library wrote, with the source that wrote it.

A self-paginating table

A long table handed over whole, deciding for itself where the pages break: its heading on top of every page, its footnote under every page, its grey grounds stated once for the whole table, and a note you draw under each page at the exact place the table reports.

Cells merged down the rows

A specification sheet whose cells are merged down the rows: each group named once beside all of its rows, with one note beside them; the thin lines stop at those cells' edges, and a note too long for the rows it covers makes them grow.

Columns measured from their cells

One parts list twice: four columns sharing the width equally, then the reference, the quantity and the price each as wide as their own widest cell and the description given everything they leave.

Pictures inside table cells

A catalogue whose first column is a picture rather than text: four pictures of very different sizes and proportions, each fitted whole and undistorted into the cell the table gives it and standing against a different corner of it, claiming no width from its column and no height from its row.