From the course: Advanced Accessible PDFs

Working with merged table cells

From the course: Advanced Accessible PDFs

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Working with merged table cells

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- [Instructor] This video is more of a public service announcement than anything and I say that because in InDesign, there's really nothing special you have to do when working with merge cells. They just work. The reason I'm mentioning it at all is because it's a common misconception that you're not allowed to merge cells in a table. That is not the case with InDesign. In Microsoft Word, sure, but InDesign handles merge cells amazingly and I'd like to show you that here in this document. So I'm beginning this video with the 0501 document open and I'm just going to zoom in on this table on the right hand page of the spread and if you look here, the Tubers cell up here at the top, that is a merged cell, right, and if I go down a little bit further, the Vegetable cell, again, also a merged cell, okay, so if I export this to a pdf, which I'm going to do by going to the file menu in InDesign and choosing export and I'm going to choose PDF interactive and I'm going to go ahead and export this document to a pdf. All right. Now if I look at the tag structure here, I dive in here and I find my table, it's nested inside of this P tag here, there we go, what you'll find is that if you go to, in my case I'm going to go to the second row here, we have one cell in that row and then we also have that down here, right, we only have one cell, so normally, right, this would cause a regularity error because other applications fail to define what's called the column span. In InDesign, however, if I right click on this cell and go to properties and I look at the attribute objects, you're going to see that InDesign properly defines the column span whenever you merge cells and that applies to whether you merge columns or whether you merge rows. If we had merged rows, we would've a row span attribute in here and if I go to the other one, do the same thing here, edit attribute objects and you could see that this one also has a column span. So again, really nothing special you have to do, I just want you to know that you can do it. Just use the merge cell feature in InDesign and pretty much merge away. InDesign'll take it from there and make sure that your merge sells output correctly.

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