Formatted printing

[Neville Smythe]

I am trying to do something seemingly very simple and I would have 
thought quite generic ... can I ask if I really am coming up against 
what seem to me to be pretty obvious shortcomings in the present 
implementations of table fields and the printing library?

(as a new user, I've had a bit of a look on the archives, and the 
thread on revPrintText is so long there clearly are many requests for 
extension of its feature set, no doubt including the following...)

I want to be able to print the contents of a formatted field, with 
column data, above which is a header which is longer than one cell of 
the column data. The header itself uses styled text and I'd like it to 
have columns too, tho' I can probably simulate that since its text 
won't vary much. The data is constructed dynamically from other 
information in the stack. The printout fills out a whole page, larger 
than a card size, so print card won't suffice. I'd prefer not to have 
vertical lines separating the columns of data, but I can live with that.

I could do this if any of the following things worked, each of which 
should IMO be possible

1. I could do it all with revPrintField using a Table field, putting 
the header stuff into the first few lines, IF I could suppress printing 
of the vGrid lines, which overprint the header. Because vGrid is 
overloaded (it flags that the field is a table AND draws the grid 
lines), and borderFill is also overloaded (controls the field border 
AND the grid lines BUT does not respond to width 0 for the grid lines!) 
this won't work. Ideally of course the display style of each cell ought 
to controllable as in a real spreadsheet, but I can wait for that (Rev 
version 3?).

2. I could do it with revPrintField if only it supported a header 
parameter a la revPrintText (why doesn't it?)

3. I could do it with revPrintText using html styling if only more 
mark-up tags were supported (tabs)

4. I could do it if multiple revPrintField and revPrintText could be 
used on a single page, ie they conformed to to an open printing/close 
printing protocol.

Am I missing something?

The only work-around I can think of is to use monospaced type for the 
column data. This is really ugly.





$@%? $@%? $@%? $@%? $@%? $@%? $@%? $@%? $@%?
Neville Smythe                                        
Neville.Smythe at anu.edu.au
Mathematical Sciences Institute                        Tel:  
61-2-6125-2709
Australian National University                           Fax: 
61-2-6125-4984
Canberra ACT 0200 AUSTRALIA                    Mob:       0414517719