Tables

Insert a table with the Insert Table button on the toolbar. Inkwell asks how many Rows and Columns you want — type the numbers rather than dragging out a grid — and inserts the table.

Books Author
The Old Man and the Sea Hemingway
The Iliad Homer
Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury
Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy

An example table

The table toolbar

Put the cursor in a table and a toolbar appears with the structural operations:

  • Add Column, Add Row, Remove Column, Remove Row, Remove Table.
  • Merge Cells — join the selected cells into one, for a heading that spans several columns.
  • Split Cells — undo a merge.
  • Caption — wrap the table in a captioned, floating table, so it gets a number, a caption, and can be placed automatically like a figure.
  • A style preset dropdown, for switching the table's whole look in one step.

Move between cells with Tab and Shift-Tab, and between rows with the up and down arrow keys.

Table settings

Tables are set up in two places, and the two do not hold the same things.

Project Settings → Tables carries what applies to every table in the project: a Default Style Preset, a Default Position, and the numbering, caption and label settings that captioned tables use — those are described under Numbering and captions below, and they are only ever set here.

These reach the tables you put in a chapter, and only those. The table of contents, the list of figures, a two-column bibliography and the running heads are laid out as tables too, but they run the full width of the page by design and are left alone by both defaults.

Project settings for tables

Everything else belongs to one table, and is set with the cursor inside it in Local Settings. The Table section there covers the table as a whole:

  • Style Preset — the named look. Left alone it follows the project default; set it and this table stops following.
  • Position — Left, Center or Right, for where the table sits across the page. It follows the project default the same way.
  • Full Width — float the table to the top of the page and, where the chapter runs in more than one column, let it span them all instead of sitting inside one. This is about the page, not the table: it will not stretch a narrow table. Only the PDF has pages to float to, so the editor and the ePub leave the table where it is.
  • Borders (all cells) and Shading (all cells) — change every cell at once, rather than selecting them.

Alongside it, three finer-grained sections take whatever the cursor is in:

  • Table Row — settings for the row.
  • Table Column — Expand (see Column widths), Alignment, Vertical Alignment, and the four margins.
  • Table Cell — Leader, Alignment, Vertical Alignment, and margins for one cell.

Column widths

There is no width box anywhere in a table's settings, and no dragging a column edge. Width is Expand, under Table Column: a column with Expand on takes up the slack, and a column with it off is only as wide as what you put in it.

Every column starts out expanding, which is why a fresh table fills the text width in equal columns. Turn Expand off on the ones holding short things — a year, a price, a single word — and they shrink to fit, while the columns still expanding divide up the room that frees, in equal shares. Turn it off everywhere and the table ends up only as wide as its contents.

The way to give a column of prose the space it needs, then, is not to widen it but to narrow its neighbours.

Expand applies to the whole column even though you set it with the cursor in a single cell — which is why it lives under Table Column rather than Table Cell. Setting it off anywhere in a column turns the whole column off.

Two things override it:

  • A centred or right-positioned table has to shrink to its contents, or there would be no space left to move it into. Those tables ignore Expand — it only shows in a table positioned Left.
  • A cell with a Leader needs slack to stretch into, so leave Expand on for the column holding one. That is how a contents line is built: the title column expands, the number and page-number columns do not.

Leaders

Leader fills the space between a cell's content and the next column: Dots for the run of dots you see in a contents list, Blank for the same stretch without them, None to leave it alone. Whatever room is left in the cell, the leader takes, which is what makes Chapter One .......... 17 line up. See Table of Contents, which is built this way.

In the PDF and the ePub the cell joins with the one to its right, so the dots carry on past the column edge and run right up to what follows. The editor cannot do that — those are cells you are still editing, and they have to stay separate — so on screen the dots stop at the edge of their own cell. The stretch is the same; only that last step is missing.

Numbering and captions

A captioned table is numbered and labelled like a figure, with the same three groups of settings:

Layout

  • Numbered By — numbering per chapter or continuous through the project.
  • Numbering — the format: Numeric (Table 1.1), Alphabetic (Table 1.a), Roman lower or upper case, Greek (Table 1.α), Star and Dagger (Table 1.*), or English Words (Table 1.One).
  • Whether to prefix the chapter number.
  • Top Margin and Bottom Margin — space around the table.
  • Gap — space between the table and its label.
  • Automatic Placement — let Inkwell float the table to the top or bottom of a page so it does not interrupt the text mid-paragraph.

Caption — Alignment, Position (above or below), Font, Font Size, Line Height, Bold, Italic.

Label — Font, Font Size, Line Height, Bold, Italic.

To refer to a table from the text, type Table and pick it from the list; the number stays correct if tables are added or moved.

➔ Figures and Images

Callouts ➔