Adobe FrameMaker: A Secret Feature in Table Styles

Posted on: May 23rd, 2024Author: barb.binderCategory: Adobe FrameMaker, Uncategorized

By Barb Binder, Adobe FrameMaker instructor at Rocky Mountain Training

FrameMaker has secret feature included in table styles that not many people are aware of—we can include paragraph styles in a table style definition. It’s not as overt as InDesign’s similar feature—called nesting—that allows us to purposely nest cell styles in table styles and paragraph styles in cell styles but it’s lurking in FrameMaker, nonetheless.

To leverage this feature, you must begin with an understanding of FrameMaker’s table structure. A FrameMaker table can have up to three sections:

1. Zero, one or more heading rows,
2. between 1–255 body rows, and
3. zero, one or more footing rows.

I’ve color-coded these in the table below. The three heading rows are purple, the six body rows are yellow and the three footing rows are blue. As a default, in a new table, FrameMaker assigns a paragraph style called CellHeading to all content in the heading and footing rows, and CellBody to all content in the body rows. This can be changed.

When creating or updating a table style, you can change the paragraph styles in each cell in the top row of each section. (See arrows, above.) If you assign different styles to the those cells, and update your table style, FrameMaker quietly takes note of them, and assigns them automatically to all the rows in that section as you add additional tables formatted with that table style definition. Each column can be different, if you like. This does not change existing tables, only new ones.

So how can you leverage this information?

Let’s say you are designing a template that will contain various types of tables. In addition to the traditional data tables you might import from Excel, you might also use a table for your figure/captions and one another one for alerts. I’ll use those two as examples, but this works with any type of table.

The figure/caption table below was created with one column, one heading row, and one body row. This allows me to assign a centered style for the figure (first row in the heading section), and a separate style for the caption (first row in the body section).

Because each cell is in the top row of its section, if I update the table style after assigning the paragraph styles, they are added to the table style definition. Now, each time I insert a new figure/caption table, the styles are preassigned.

In the same file, I might also need alert tables. The one below is two columns, one body row and no heading or footing rows. Because each cell is in the top row of its section (body rows), if I update the table style after assigning the styles to each cell, and then update my table style, they are added to the table style definition. Now, each time I insert a new figure/caption table, the paragraph styles are preassigned.

Once set up, each time I want to add a new table, I can just choose the table style name in the Insert Table dialog box and FrameMaker will take care of the table formatting and the paragraph style assignments.