Table inspector from 4W

[Richard Gaskin]

-= JB =- wrote:
 > I think I know what you mean by independent column alignment.
 > Are you wanting to have each column use Left Center or RIght
 > justification?

Yep - probably the one feature most developers here would prioritize 
above all else, so central to information displays as it is.


 > If so I bet that can be done pretty easy and you could have each
 > cell or each column justified.  It would take a little bit of math
 > to add a character in front of the item or column of items to
 > properly align the text Left Center or Right.  Not a big deal really.

Try it on a field with a couple hundred columns and a few thousand rows 
and you'll see where this goes pretty quickly.

Dropping that much data into a Rev field as it is today is lightning 
fast - faster to display and much smoother to scroll than even Excel or 
Word.

But if you had to walk through each item of each line to calculate the 
formattedWidth, and hope that you could obtain a correct formattedWidth 
for the preceding padding spaces needed to have it line up, with the 
engine as it currently is it's very slow.

And with anything other than monospaced fonts very close to impossible 
to get truly good alignment.  The space character is more than one pixel 
wide so it requires settling for approximation, which ultimately means 
some items will be a pixel or two off, resulting in a ragged right edge.

With a monospaced font it's possible to get adequate alignment, but the 
performance issue remains.  And with the customary application fonts on 
every supported platform being non-monospaced, whose users would be 
happy being limited to Courier or Monaco?  At a minimum, to deliver 
professional work we need Lucida Grande on OS X and Tregoe on Windows 
(though it does't matter on Linux because there is no single standard <g>).

As much as I appreciate your ambition, I believe this is a task best 
suited for the engine.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Media Corporation
  ___________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com       http://www.FourthWorld.com