Hi Paul,
Thanks for your reqeust. I would like to clarify a bit
regarding horizontally merged cells. By Microsoft Word design, rows in a table
in a Microsoft Word document are completely independent. It means each row can
have any number of cells of any width. So if you imagine first row with one
wide cell and second row with two narrow cells, then looking at this document
the cell in the first row will appear horizontally merged. But it is not a
merged cell; it is just a single wide cell. Another perfectly valid scenario is
when the first row has two cells. First cell has CellMerge.First and
second cell has CellMerge.Previous, in this case it is a merged cell. In
both cases, the visual appearance in MS Word is exactly the same. Both cases
are valid.
Here is simple code, which demonstrates the described
things.
// Create empty document and DocumentBuilder object.
Document doc = new Document();
DocumentBuilder builder
= new DocumentBuilder(doc);
// Configure DocumentBuilder
builder.getCellFormat().getBorders().setLineStyle(LineStyle.SINGLE);
builder.getCellFormat().getBorders().setColor(Color.BLACK);
// Build table, with simply wide cells.
// First row will contains simply wide cell and in MS
Word it will look like merged.
builder.insertCell();
builder.getCellFormat().setWidth(200);
builder.write("This is
simply wide cell");
builder.endRow();
// Insert the second row
builder.insertCell();
builder.getCellFormat().setWidth(100);
builder.insertCell();
builder.getCellFormat().setWidth(100);
builder.endRow();
builder.endTable();
// Insert few paragraphs between table.
builder.writeln();
builder.writeln();
// Build table, with merged cells.
// First row will contains merged cells.
builder.insertCell();
builder.getCellFormat().setWidth(100);
builder.getCellFormat().setHorizontalMerge(CellMerge.FIRST);
builder.write("This is
merged cells");
builder.insertCell();
builder.getCellFormat().setWidth(100);
builder.getCellFormat().setHorizontalMerge(CellMerge.PREVIOUS);
builder.endRow();
// Insert the second row
builder.insertCell();
builder.getCellFormat().setWidth(100);
builder.getCellFormat().setHorizontalMerge(CellMerge.NONE);
builder.insertCell();
builder.getCellFormat().setWidth(100);
builder.getCellFormat().setHorizontalMerge(CellMerge.NONE);
builder.endRow();
builder.endTable();
// Save output document
doc.save("C:\\Temp\\out.doc");
However, in your case you call updateTableLayout. UpdateTableLayout
usually gives good result. But sometimes with complex tables it can give
incorrect result, i.e. table layout can be broken. This is because algorithm of
UpdateTableLayout is not the same as MS Word uses to layout tables. So in your
case, I would recommend you to use simply wide cells instead of merged cells.
Best regards,
Alexey Noskov
Developer/Technical Support
Aspose Auckland Team
