Pages 1.0.2: Can’t do table borders thinner than 1 point
Posted by Pierre Igot in: PagesSeptember 14th, 2005 • 10:12 am
Like most features in Pages, the built-in features for creating and formatting tables are quite decent, but you have to dig a bit to find out about them.
If you just refer to the “Table Inspector” in the inspector palette or to the “” submenu in the “” menu, you might think that Pages is missing essential features like the ability to center text vertically in table cells or the ability to add cell padding.
But such features are there. It’s just that they are not where you would expect them. Instead of looking in the “Table Inspector” in the inspector palette or to the “” submenu in the “” menu, you actually have to go (respectively) to the “Text” tab in the “Text Inspector” and to the “Graphic Inspector.”
The “Text” tab in the “Text Inspector” includes buttons for aligning text vertically. These buttons are disabled when you are typing text in a plain document, so you might not notice them. But they are there, right next to the horizontal alignment buttons.
And the “Graphic Inspector” has a “Stroke” section that is active when you select a table or range of table cells and lets you change the “stroke” settings for the borders around the cells.
Unfortunately, these settings are very limited. There is only one style of stroke available (a continuous line), and the minimum “line width” (thickness) setting is “1 pt.” Unless I am missing something here, you cannot go lower than 1 point, which is problematic, but it means that it is impossible to have thin borders around table cells. (A 1 point border is already pretty thick.)
There is no way around this. The only “solution” that I have found is to change the colour of the border to a pale gray, so that the thickness of it is not too obvious and too much of an eye sore. But it’s not really a solution…