Decreasing space above and below a table (redux)

[alanterra]

I am having problems getting rid of space above a table. There was a discussion a few years ago about this same subject: http://nisus.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f= ... 63f#p22525. I don't think that it has been addressed again, but apologies if this is a duplicate question.

As noted, you can drag a table up/down a limited amount of space (a few inches) to put space between that table and the preceding text. However, if the table spans more than one page, this mechanism seems to be broken, and the space above the table is fixed.

Try the two documents attached. On the "can change space" document, click on the table until the blue boxes appear, then hover over the top left until the hand appears. Now you can drag the table up and down. On the "cannot change space" when you try to do this, the hand will move to the end of the table and you can't adjust the table. (It did work once for me, but mostly it doesn't). The only difference is the number of lines in the table.

I am using Mavericks latest if that matters.

[alanterra]

And a work-around that I found after posting. If you try to grab the table way over on its right top side, sometimes you can drag it.

[martin]

This does appear to be a problem with multi-page tables and dragging the origin hotspot to reduce the spacing. I'll file that as something we should look at.

In the meantime, there is a workaround. First, select the table in the enclosing text:

table.png (22.23 KiB) Viewed 5677 times

This is a different kind of selection, where you select the table as if it were a paragraph in the document body. You can see that there are no blue resize squares/handles for the table, indicating that the selection is not inside the table. The easiest way to get this kind of selection is using the keyboard: click before the table and then use the Right arrowkey and Shift key to create a selection that encompasses just the table.

Once you have the table selected in such a way, use the Paragraph palette to reduce the "before" spacing to 0 points. In your example document it was set to 200 pts.

I hope that helps. Please let us know if you have any questions.

[alanterra]

Ah, that does help. I didn't see that parameter. Thank you!