Table Cell Alignment

[Stuart Rogers]

Lin Surasky wrote:
> Hi all-
>  
> Is there a known issue with vertical alignment in table cells (FM 7.2 on
> Windows XP, unstructured)?
>  
> I don't use tables very often, but I have a small one that has a few
> narrow columns that contain asterisks to indicate whether a condition is
> met, and one column of text that describes the solution based on where
> the asterisks fall.
>  
> I want the asterisks to be centered in the table cell, so I assigned
> them all a paragraph tag that defines both their horizontal and vertical
> alignment as centered.
>  
> What I'm getting is top alignment for the first row (below the header
> row and the only single-line row in the table), center alignment for the
> third row, which is the tallest row, and
> top-to-center-well-I-guess-it's-close-enough alignment for the rest of
> the rows.
>  
> The default table cell margins are all even (4.0 pt), and there are no
> format overrides, either at the paragraph level or at the table format
> level (as far as I can tell...).
>  
> What else should I be looking at?

Lin,

I think what you're seeing is just the fact the an asterisk is (in most 
fonts) located at the top of the cap height or the ascender height, in 
other words, not vertically centred within its own character space.

The asterisk *looks* centred in the tallest row only because your eye 
can't judge precisely enough to see that it's slightly too high; in the 
shortest row, the difference is more obvious.

You could centre an asterisk as a text line in a small anchored frame 
(maybe tweaking the A-frame's Distance above baseline), then copy/paste 
into your cells.

HTH,

-- 
Stuart Rogers
Technical Communicator
Phoenix Geophysics Limited
Toronto, ON, Canada
+1 (416) 491-7340 x 325

srogers phoenix-geophysics com

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  Others must fail."

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