I’m trying to understand something: I wanted a bit of space below my tables without using the dread empty paragraph. I can do it in 'Tables > Table Properties > Table. Works fine. However in the ‘Styles’ we have ‘Table’ and ‘Table Contents’. I tried adding ‘Below Paragraph’ space in both of those and it seems to have no effect at all. What should I expect from those settings? They must do something but it’s not what I’d expect obviously. What’s the understanding of this?
Table Contents and Table Heading are paragraph styles. Paragraph styles have an effect on text, i.e. on contents of table cells.
If you want to create some “breathing space” around your table:
- right-click on table and
Table Properties, - go to
Tabletab - change Spacing parameters
1 Like
As I said, ‘Table Properties …’ did the trick, and I see what you’re saying as to ‘Table Contents’ but it didn’t seem to change anything. And what’s ‘Table’ itself? BTW ‘Table Heading’ DOES respond to ‘Below Paragraph’ so there’s no confusion there. This isn’t really important, nothing is broken, I’m just trying to get the logic of the thing sorted out.
Everything in Writer follows a box model a bit similar to was is specified in HTML with a somewhat different vocabulary.
Regarding tables, you haver “inner” and “outer” spacing strategies.
“Inner” spacing is about what is inside the border (even if you didn’t enforce border display):
- cells can have a padding which is set in
Borderstab - inside cells, text is controlled, as usual, by paragraph styles
Consequently, you can add indents and spacing above/below each paragraph according to its style
“Outer” spacing deals with padding around the table as a whole. It is set in Table tab.
By default, Writer tables extend from margin to margin and horizontal spacing is grayed out. If you manually set a width, you can change left and right spacing. Vertical spacing is always available.
Complicated! But that helps, thanks. It’s going to take some time to really get comfortable with all this.