Tables, and why tabs are not one

Tabs are not a table

A great many price lists, timetables and specification sheets are built by typing text and pressing Tab. It looks like a table and it behaves like nothing.

What goes wrong:

• A cell whose text is longer than its column pushes everything after it out of line, with no warning.
• A row cannot have a background fill, a border, or vertical alignment.
• Adding a column means retyping every row.
• The whole thing breaks when the typeface changes, which is the exact scenario the styles lesson was about.

A real table object fixes all four, and every layout application has one.

Building one properly

• InDesign: Table ▸ Insert Table, or select text with tabs and Table ▸ Convert Text to Table, choosing the column and row separators. Then Table Styles and Cell Styles, which work exactly like paragraph styles: define once, apply everywhere, change centrally.
• Affinity Publisher: the Table tool, with Table Formats and Text Styles.
• Scribus: Insert ▸ Table. Scribus’s tables are usable but noticeably less developed than InDesign’s: cell styles arrived late and merging behaviour is fiddly. For a complex table in Scribus, many people build it in LibreOffice Calc, export a PDF, and place that.
• LibreOffice Writer: real tables with styles, and good at long data tables that run over pages.

The features worth knowing exist

Repeating header rows. A table spanning four pages should carry its column headings onto each. In InDesign: select the header row, Table ▸ Convert Rows ▸ To Header. Doing this by hand means the headings are wrong the moment a row is inserted.

Cell styles inside a table style. The table style names which cell style applies to the header row, the body rows, the first column and so on. One definition for the whole document’s tables.

Alternating row fills. Table Options ▸ Alternating Fills. Set it in the style, never by colouring rows individually: inserting a row then breaks the alternation everywhere below.

Tabular figures. Covered in the type module, and this is where it matters: a column of numbers in proportional figures will not align however you set the tabs or the cell alignment, because the digits themselves are different widths.

Decimal-aligned tabs inside cells. For a price column, set a right-aligned or decimal tab inside the cell rather than right-aligning the whole cell, so 1,250.00 and 95.50 line up on the point.

Designing a table people can read

The default table (a box around every cell) is the hardest to read, because the rules compete with the data.

• Delete most of the rules. A line under the header and a line at the foot is usually enough. Vertical rules are almost never needed; the space between columns does that job.
• Use space, not lines. Increase the cell inset before you add a border.
• Align numbers right, text left, headers with their data. A centred column of numbers is unreadable.
• Do not centre headers over left-aligned text. Align the header the same way as the column beneath it.
• A light alternating tint at 5 to 8% beats ruled rows for a long table, and remember from the colour module that 5% on uncoated stock may print at 12%.

The free path, end to end

For a specification sheet or a price list with no budget:

1. Keep the data in a spreadsheet: LibreOffice Calc or a CSV.
2. Either place the exported PDF into Scribus as a picture, or use Scribus’s table and paste the data column by column.
3. For anything complex, generate it as HTML with CSS and render with WeasyPrint. Tables are what HTML was invented for, and CSS gives you repeating headers (<thead>), page-break control and alternating rows for nothing.

That third route sounds like more work and is less work as soon as the table has more than about forty rows or changes more than once.

The habit

Keep the data in one place and pull it into the layout, rather than retyping it. Whenever a table exists in both a spreadsheet and a layout, they will disagree within a month, and the version that goes to press will be the wrong one.