Rules or white space for separating rows and columns?

[Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>]

Milan Davidovic reported the following advice: <<From Carolyn Rude,  
"Technical Editing" 2nd ed., p. 167: "Vertical and horizontal lines  
(rules) separating rows and columns are discouraged except for highly  
complex tables because the lines clutter the table with visual noise.  
White space is the preferred method for separating rows and columns.  
Too much space between columns, however, may result in inaccurate  
reading because the eye may skip to a lower or higher row.">>

Good basic advice, but not to be taken as a rule <ahem> of nature.  
Rude is certainly correct that you don't want the table to look like  
a sheet of graph paper, but absolutely forbidding the use of lines is  
going too far. The basic principle can be boiled down to "use the  
minimum number of rules necessary to visually group related data and  
separate it from unrelated groups of data; where possible, use white  
space instead of a line". You can easily tell if white space provides  
sufficient distinction by walking back about 10 feet* and looking at  
the table: if you can see distinct rows and columns using white space  
alone, you don't need lines. If adjacent lines blur together, you  
need more space or an occasional line to group things appropriately.

* Your distance may vary. <g> The point is that you should see the  
rows as single objects, not as individual words.

For example, you'll often see a very simple format in which the  
column titles are bordered on top and bottom only by a line that  
separates them from the text above the table and the rows below the  
titles that contain the table's data; a final horizontal line at the  
bottom of the table separates it from the text that follows. That's  
very effective without creating visually intrusive numbers of lines.

For cell data that align neatly (e.g., all left justified or decimal  
aligned), you don't usually need vertical lines, because it's easy to  
scan vertically downwards without skipping to another column.  
Horizontal lines are more necessary, particularly in wide tables,  
because it's more easy to skip lines. So you'll often find it  
necessary to insert horizontal lines or white space, but not vertical  
lines.

<<Right now, I'm building a template in the shadow of legacy  
documentation that is chock full of tables, almost all of which make  
full use of rules to separate rows and columns; relatively few of  
these tables are "complex". If I follow Rude's advice, I'm pretty   
sure I'll experience some opposition.>>

If everyone is enamored of the lines, the most effective approach is  
to eliminate some, but not all, of the lines: cut out any lines that  
don't help, and retain the ones that do. Odds are good nobody will  
notice. If you're old enough to remember the paper used for line  
printers (and some smaller dot matrix printers), you'll be familiar  
with another alternative that often works even better than white  
space and lines: use light color shading to group rows of data. For  
example, a 10% or 20% grey can be used to group one set of adjacent  
rows, and the absence of this shading for the next group of rows  
provides a clear but not distracting visual separation.

This works best where the groups of data are roughly equal in size  
(number of lines); it can produce distracting variation in the amount  
of color on the page if the groups vary widely in size.


----------------------------------------------------
-- Geoff Hart
ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca / geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com
www.geoff-hart.com
--------------------------------------------------
***Now available***  _Effective onscreen editing_
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