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> Second, although I've successfully tried printing the file (using a
> Postscript printer) and creating an Adobe Acrobat .pdf file, I haven't
> yet tested how this will output on a typesetter, particularly if the
> table contains color information (Word doesn't understand color the
> same way typesetters do, so...). I imagine it would be safer to just
> use the tools in PageMaker to add color to the table. Obviously,
> some experimentation lies ahead of me!
>
That is why we (my company) abandonned using Word tables in PageMaker,
at least for those documents with colour elements--the method works
fairly well for black and white. If you want certain Word table elements
to be the same colour as other elements in the PM doc, they won't be.
You can try superimposing coloured lines etc. over a Word table, but
that is a nitty process, and often a bit frustrating. It's ok if you
only need to do it once, but if the table is updated, and that changes
the position of your coloured elements, you have to position them all
over again. Furthermore, you can't adust the kerning or leading very
accurately in Word, which means that your Word elements may look a
little odd amidst your more precisely formatted PageMaker text. Of
course, you can adjust your PM text to look like the Word text. Adobe
Table 3 (much better than its previous incarnations) will provide much
more control over colour etc., but it is still a veritable pain to
use--very time consuming for something like a column of decimal-aligned
numerals that you could do in Word in a tenth the time. We are not very
happy with any of the methods we have tried for including tables in
PageMaker documents. We begin to feel that carefully creating
tab-delimited tables in native PM is probably the best solution, at
least for simpler tables. Good luck though, and if your colour and font
requirements aren't quite as demanding as ours, the Word approach may
work fine.
