I put cells and empty text - to be populated later into designer…

The preview pane preserves the area allocated to the cell through the width but when viewed in browser - it seem like the jsf engine collapses cells that have no data and thus messes up formating.

Is there a control that doesn’t collapse that I should use?

My only funky work-around is to put some text in the cell and make the font color the same as the background color to keep it from collapsing… thanks

This isn’t due to the jsf engine collapsing anything. It is how the rendering engine of the browser interprets html and css.

One thing you might try is to select your empty text control in Designer and by dragging, stretch it out to your desired width. Designer will then add a CSS style to it (look at the properties to see for yourself!) similar to: width: 543px; depending on how wide you stretch the control.

PS: I’d recommend using Firebug to examine the DOM and experiment with modifying the CSS styles on the fly to get the css that you prefer.

Hope this helps.
Regards,
–mark

I already tried that and it still collapses

Ok, this is something that you should be able to recreate with a hand crafted html page. Can you try that and see if you can replicate the collapsing? If so, then you should try to modify that html (maybe add an NBSP entity, or modify the style).

If you can’t find a solution, post the html page and i’ll give it a look.

Regards,
–mark