Hallo,

I recently encountered this problem regarding the background color of
table cells and wonder if there are any new insights/solutions to this
problem.

For all those who do not know what I mean I will try to give you an
explanation:
General stuff:
- it seems to apply to different versions of MS Word, older and newer
ones
- the effects depend on the printer driver used
- on screen and in the print preview everything is correct

The problem:
- I have a simple table: one row, two columns, making it two cells
- each of the two cells has a different, non-white, background color
applied. Many users that asked similar questions here received as an
answer that they should check whether the background color is applied
only to the paragraph(s) within the cell or the whole cell, or if there
is a general table background color set as well. I can assure you: the
cells and only the cells have a background color applied
- the cell's contents are different, the rightmost cell contains more
lines of text than the other, different line heights, different font
size etc.
- in order to get a certain distance between the text and the cells
bounds I set a padding for all borders

If I print the document on my Epson Stylus CX3200, the left cell is
printed ok. The right cell is almost printed ok, but the rectangle
beginning below the last line of text down to the bottom border of the
cell, and spanning the complete width of the cell, is printed with the
background color that is assigned to left cell. The height of this
rectangle equals the bottom padding I assigned to this cell.

If I print this document to the PDFWriter, the effects are different,
but it depends on the version of the PDFWriter Printer driver as well.
I tested it with a newer one (don't have the version number at hand
right now), and the effects were similar to those described above.

With Version 5.0 of this driver the effects are even more bizarre, and
it took me a while to track down how it works. First, if there is a
left and/or right padding assigned to the cells, parts of the space at
the border of the cell will be printed white. Instead, one should use
indentation and margins before the first paragraph and/or after the
last paragraph in order to establish the padding.
In addition, if one cell contains less text than the other, then in
that "emptier" cell the area below the end-of-cell-mark is not painted
in the background color completely. There is an area at the right
border of the cell that is left white. If I change the vertical align
to bottom, than the area from the top border of the cell to the top
border of the text is printed in this malicious way.
If I'd fill in empty paragraphs after the text of the "emptier" cell,
and by this move the end-of-cell-mark down, the printing error is
getting smaller. But if the line heights of the text in the cells are
different, there will allways be a difference in the text height, and
thus there will always be a small area with the printing error. If I
add too many empty paragraphs, so that now the "emptier" cell becomes
the "fuller" cell, then the error occurs in the other cell, which is
now the "emptier" one.

I found meny entries of users having this problem, but I didn't find
any answer or solution to it so far.

I can get rid of the white gaps at the broder by substituting cell
padding with indentation, and margin before/margin after of the
paragraphs within the cell. But I cannot get rid of that printing
problem that occurs in cells that don't contain as much text as the
fullest cell. I could fill those cells with empty paragraphs, and by
setting appropriate line heights make the height of the text of those
cells exactly the height of the fullest cell, but by this I would loose
flexibility, because I want the users to be able to edit the text as
they need it.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Regards,

Christian Kirchhoff

P.S.: In the beginning I assigned a background color to the whole table
(and then distinct colors to the cells). After I took away the table
background color, printing on my Epson is correct. But PDFs are still
wrong...

Hi Christian,

Word uses information from the driver of the currently selected printer to help determine how to layout information on the page.
How effective or problematic this is can vary between Word versions (or even a single Word version with or without some of its
updates) and with different combination printers/printer driverfs.

You didn't mention the version of Word you were doing the testing in, but in Word 2003, or the precise steps, but for the PDF
creation, that too may be a 'printer driver specific' issue.

For example, if I create a simple table, select the table and use Format=Background=Shading and apply color to the table and then
use the same technique to apply a different color to individual cells the cells print as shown on screen when using the 'Cute' PDF
printer (http://cutepdf.com)

===============
wrote in message oups.com...
P.S.: In the beginning I assigned a background color to the whole table
(and then distinct colors to the cells). After I took away the table
background color, printing on my Epson is correct. But PDFs are still
wrong...
--
Let us know if this helped you,

Bob Buckland ?:-)
MS Office System Products MVP

*Courtesy is not expensive and can pay big dividends*

For Everyday MS Office tips to "use right away" -
http://microsoft.com/events/series/a...andtricks.mspx