Xara Designer Pro+ 22.1.0.65105 SL x64 Sep 2 2022 - Released

[PhilM]

I was going to make a series of Table Challenges so TGers could better understand the new Table Tool but in the end it has to be a series of Xara Questions.

Working in millipoints.
Select the Table tool.
Click-drag to make a 2x2 Table.
Use the Drag Row/Column Boundary to ensure the cell size is at its smallest.

Question 1
Why are the Row Height and Column Widths different (26673mp x 26261mp)?
Question 2
Input 10000mp into the Row Height.
A Dialog advises Cell size must be between 14173mp and 11338582mp.
Input anything below 14173mp and the Dialog re-appears.
Input anything greater up to 26673mp and the field stubbornly shows 26673mp.
Only when you input above this value does the Row Height change.
Ditto for the Column.
Why?

Make the Cells square - 30000x30000mp.
Set the Spacing to 10000mp.

Question 3
Now set the Spacing back to 0mp.
The Cells are now 44625x44625mp.
Put the Spacing back to 10000mp.
The Cells are again 30000x30000mp.
Why?

Question 4
Why is the Padding at such a large arbitrary value?
Why can the Padding Control not be grabbed and dragged?

Question 5
Working with the Cells as 30000x30000mp.
Note the default Border Width is still in Points (0.75pt == 750mp).
Why does a Table have no Perimeter or Area?
Switch to the Selector tool and press Ctrl+J (Join Shapes).
Note the P & A values (120900mp & 90.6sqpt)
Instead use Ctrl+1 (Add Shapes) (243000mp & 3690.6sqpt).
Set the Border to 0mp.
Ctrl+J --> (721500mp & 41.5sqpt).
Ctrl+1 --> (241500mp & 3645.1sqpt).
What is your logic not to present the Add Shapes P & A results?

Acorn

Q1 The result I get in a new doc is that both Cell height and Cell width are 26261mp. You may have had a current font size attribute that affected the height (since cells are populated with text using the current attrs). This is an oddity that we are looking at.

Q2 See above but also: Row height is constrained by the size of the text within the cells. (If each cell contained at least one visible character you'd be able to see more clearly what's going on.) Note that you can remove the cell size dependency on font size by setting the "Auto-fit to container" option. The minimum size that the warning dialog quotes, 14173mp, is the size of the content rectangle in a cell, excluding padding and excluding the effects of cell borders. If you turn those things off you still can't quite get down to the quoted 14173 minimum so there's some discrepancy here that we need to investigate but it's not a major issue.

Q3 Spacing tries to work within the current table size. So when you increase the spacing value it reduces the sizes of the cells to keep the overall table size constant. But because you have actively set the cell sizes to 30000 (setting a user minimum mentioned above), the cells can't be made any smaller and so the table size increases. That table size is now big enough to contain spacing values between 0 and 10000 by adjusting the cell sizes, thus when you set 10000 spacing again the cell sizes can just expand to their previous 30000 minimum size. (Erm... I may need to think that through again!)

Q4 The default padding value was chosen as a reasonable size for a normal sized table. There are no draggable padding handles yet (there will be one day). You are probably looking at the selection blobs of the text inside the cells. Whether these blobs should be shown for text inside table cells is open to debate.

Q5 The border width control uses the same logic (literally) as the line width control. This was a specific feature request. Showing the Perimeter and Area of tables has not been looked at yet - not considered as important or useful as the myriad other features that need to be done. Can you put forward a good use case?

Phil