I want to keep the table size static because it is to be machine read. Long lines cause line breaks which increases the height of the row. I would rather truncate the long lines. Is this possible?
Are your "lines"cell contents?
Where do they come from? Why don’t you care for shorter lines from the beginning if much of the content is somehow irrelevent (doesn’t need to be printed / machine read)?
Why should info get processed by a chain of printing / automatic reading? It’s error-prone.
Hi
If I understand well you can do Edit▸Find & Replace
- Find
(.{0,30}).*where e.g.30is the maximum number of characters - Replace
$1 - Other options:
- Current selection only (if needed)
- Tick
Regular expressions
Regards
Hi, thanks for you suggestion. That would work, but it’s a bit too much work for me. 
I was hoping for something that worked automatically, for different column widths and fonts.
You may try fix row height. Choose an appropriate value depending on your font size / paragraph properties.
To clip the oversized cell contents permanently follow the advice by @PYS .
Thanks, that seems to be the best way.
By default, tables in Writer have automatically growing row heights.
To change that setting for a table, select the rows you want to be fixed-height (possibly whole table), menu Table-Size-Row Height…, and uncheck Fit to size. Then you’ll need to define required height of the row manually. This will truncate everything that doesn’t fit into the cell.
Thank you!