Multicolumn Printing (Text Flow)?

[J. Landman Gay]

On 11/15/04 3:06 PM, Frank D. Engel, Jr. wrote:

> I'm reasonably certain I'm going to have to jury-rig something to get 
> this working, but just in case anyone is aware of some easy (or easier) 
> solution, I thought it might be a good idea to ask...
> 
> I need to generate a printout featuring a header, a footer, and two 
> columns of body text in between.  The body text is coming from a single 
> body of text (in other words, on data entry, it is entered as one long 
> data entry in a single field, but when printed I need to split it into 
> two columns).  This is paragraph-style data, so I can hardly just count 
> lines and split in half or anything...
> 
> My best guess is to create separate fields for the left and right 
> columns and somehow figure out where to split the text so that I can fit 
> the text neatly into the two columns.  Does anyone know of an easy way 
> to figure out where to split this?

There is an old HyperCard hack for this. It isn't elegant -- I suppose 
there is a more mathematical way -- but it works. We were never above 
attacking these problems by brute force. ;)

You might want to lock the screen while this executes:

on splitText
   get the bottomright of fld 1
   subtract 5 from item 1 of it
   subtract 5 from item 2 of it
   click at it
   put the number of words in char 1 to (word 4 of the selectedchunk) \
       of fld 1 into theLastWd
   set the htmltext of fld 2 to the htmltext of word theLastWd + 1 \
       to (the number of words in fld 1) of fld 1
   delete word theLastWd + 1 to (the number of words in fld 1) of fld 1
end splitText

If you need more columns, just take what's in field 2 and repeat the 
process, putting the results into fld 3, and so forth.

The fields can't have much extra white space at the bottom; set the 
height to just barely more than the last line and set the margins to 
almost nothing. Otherwise the click command won't select in the correct 
place. Alternately, you can increase the 5 pixel adjustment to account 
for extra white space at the bottom of the field.

-- 
Jacqueline Landman Gay         |     jacque at hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software           |     http://www.hyperactivesw.com