table anchors - best practices?

[Combs, Richard]

Karen Mardahl wrote: 
 
> My take on this - and I am looking for support, comments, or 
> modifications - is that you should have a unique table anchor 
> paragraph tag for anchoring all tables. I believe this gives 
> you best overall control. Two reasons so far:
> 
> 1. A unique tag always gives good control over material.
> 2. Wise formatting of this tag gives consistent spacing. And 
> because the formatting is built into a tag, you do not have 
> to resort to any manual formatting, which you might need to 
> do, if you just attach/anchor the table to the preceding 
> block of text or whatever.

Well, others have about covered this, but for the record, I agree with
both these reasons. I never let tables float, and I never anchor more
than one in each anchor pgf. They're always set to Start Anywhere, which
means they're always immediately after the anchor pgf. Our table titles
are above the tables (so jumps to them in the PDF take you to the top of
the table, not the bottom). Thus, the anchor pgf controls the space
above the table title and determines absolutely where in the flow the
table appears. 

I use a pgf tag called TableAnchor that's 7 pt red text with 5 pt space
above. Why 7 pt red? It's the smallest text size for which the pilcrow
(pgf symbol) remains visible at 100% on my monitor, and the red color
just makes it easier to spot. I also use red for the other tags that are
intended to be used only as empty pgfs -- FigAnchor and PageBreak. 

I don't mind the extra white space when a table starts at the top of the
page, but as others have noted, you can eliminate that completely by
using negative space below on the anchor pgf and the same negative space
above on the table. Assuming you don't mind having your anchor pgf
completely hidden by the table -- I suppose I could get used to that,
but I'm not sure I like the idea. :-) 

Richard


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Richard G. Combs
Senior Technical Writer
Polycom, Inc.
richardDOTcombs AT polycomDOTcom
303-223-5111
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rgcombs AT gmailDOTcom
303-777-0436
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