XMetal (12) and html table’s border formatting

[bk]

Hi,

I'm using XMetal 12 with HTML tables and i would like to know how to get rid of the defaut display of table border (double border) in the editing view.

I try the following in the CSS (setting table border attribute to 0 or 1) but no change at all, the default “double” border is displayed :

TABLE, TH, TD {
border: 1px black solid;
border-collapse: collapse;
}

Any idea ?

Bk

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[Derek Read]

In XMetaL (all products: XMetaL Author Enterprise, XMetaL Author Essential, XMAX) borders on tables (CALS and HTML) cannot be styled using CSS.

If you turn off the display of borders for a table (which can be done by setting the @border for the table value to an empty string or “0”) the software still renders dotted lines because without any lines visible it can be very difficult to edit a table.

There are no plans to implement fancier CSS styling for tables. That would likely slow down editing speed. Unlike a browser which only needs to render a table once, an editor like XMetaL Author re-flows the entire table with each edit made to table content and the more things it needs to take into consideration when doing that rendering the longer it will take to complete.

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[bk]

Thank you Derek for your precise and complete answer.

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[Derek Read]

If you really want to hide borders on a table, and the table is HTML, and you have set the value for @border to 0 (so that the borders are currently being displayed as a dotted line), in newer versions of the software you can select View > Hide Table Grid. The option Show Table Grid will render them again. View settings don't alter markup in any way.

This feature was designed like a sort of preview to answer the question “I wonder what my borderless table might look like after my document has been transformed to a format where tables aren't visible”. Of course some assumptions need to be made here but it can give you some rough idea. I wouldn't recommend trying to author this way though.

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