Improved Table Handling
With the expansion of the World Wide Web we have experienced a deluge of authors who misuse html – either deliberately or in ignorance. One of the most common misuses is the way ‘tables’ are used for text layout purposes to achieve DTP-like effects. Oddly enough, the ‘table’ feature of html was introduced for, erm, ‘tables’. You know, those laid out columns and rows of structured information. Alas, it is now depressingly common to find a webpage that is the equivalent of any printed A4 pages long, all of which is in a single ‘table’ simply to obtain a margin down the side of the page! Worse still, are webpages where a single table cell can be long enough to require dozens – or even hundreds – of printed pages! They sometimes even have enormous single cells that have other, large, tables ‘nested’ inside them. Aaaaaargh! Nurse, bring me my shotgun!!
For structurally-oriented applications like TW/EW which are conventionally targetted on printed output, this has been a problem as these tables can become too large to fit onto a printed page. To make things worse, a similar misuse of ‘tables’ for layout purposes also seems to be becoming common amongst those cursed with having to use ‘Word’.
The usual visible result of this problem is webpages or Word files where sections of text ‘vanish’ when imported into TW/EW as they won’t fit onto a single page.
To try and deal with this problem the Pro+ has introduced an improved way to process table data. This means Pro+ can cope with absurdly misused tables that previous versions of TW/EW could not handle. Please note, however, that for obvious reasons, enourmous tables in Pro+ documents saved in this new format may not work when loaded into older versions of EW/TW!
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