I have the following situation. I have created a document (see below) that has a header (dynamic in size), a footer (dynamic in size) and a variable list of detail lines (6 in this example). The table for the detail lines uses a rowspan when the information for the 6 lines is the same so I do not have to repeat it for all lines.
When I use a table with regular rows (TR) the system automatically determines if the table still fits on the page or not and creates a second table for the rest of the rows (which results in a second page).
When filling the rowspan column with data and the amount of data is more than would fit on the page (so the text will go over the bottom margin) the system is unable to handle this and will fail.
The only way to currently handle this is do all the calculations manually (very complicated) where I calculate the total space available for the detail section (page size - header - footer) and then fill the rowspan with text and remove a word from the text while it is still too large to fit on the page.
Once it fits again I create a second table and put the remaining text in the 2nd rowspan.
Unfortunately this requires very complex calculations and needs to account for font height and safety margins, etc.
Would it be possible to support a rowspan in the future where PlanetPress Connect will calculate automatically how much text will actually fit on the page and breaks it off at the right point itself?
That is an interesting case. Not something we can solve easily but I would like to investigate things a bit further. Would you be able to supply the template and some sample data?
Thank you for your response.
Note that I have a document that works a lot of the times but from time to time it does not and the whole layout gets messed up. As this is a very complex document (it is so complex that it causes major slowdowns of my designer when in preview mode - when editing a script in preview mode it freezes for a couple of seconds every 10 seconds or so).
I will see if I can provide a template soon but it will take some time as I need to anonymize the data and strip out all the other document templates / scripts first.
Is there any news regarding this item?
I had to spend an entire weekend to come up with a very complex workaround as the system is unable to handle these cases?
At first I tried solving this by getting the line height and then subtract the footer margin from the top margin to get the amount of pixels available and divide that by the line height to get the number of lines.
Connect Design does break off the lines just fine if something does not fit but unfortunately this will not work as I need the total number of lines that will still fit.
So, in this case I need to do everything myself; breaking up the lines if things do not fit anymore, create additional tables so things move to the next page, etc. which was a gigantic work.
It would be great if the system would handle this case as currently the rowspan does not work, which can be demonstrated with a very quick example.
Create an empty template
Set the top + bottom margin for the Master page to 5 inch
Create a sample table for the print section:
<table id="test" data-column-resize="" data-detail="jobs" style="width:100%; text-align:left;" title="jobs">
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Sample column 1</th>
<th>Sample column 2</th>
<th>Sample column 3</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>sample data 1</td>
<td rowspan="12">sample data 2</td>
<td>sample data 3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>sample data 1</td>
<td>sample data 3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>sample data 1</td>
<td>sample data 3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>sample data 1</td>
<td>sample data 3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>sample data 1</td>
<td>sample data 3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>sample data 1</td>
<td>sample data 3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>sample data 1</td>
<td>sample data 3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>sample data 1</td>
<td>sample data 3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>sample data 1</td>
<td>sample data 3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>sample data 1</td>
<td>sample data 3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>sample data 1</td>
<td>sample data 3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>sample data 1</td>
<td>sample data 3</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
That is because in your case, you are using rowspan in a tiny space (5 in from the top and bottom). It is like asking the pagination process to take a cell and split it which, at this moment, is not something it can do.
So rowpsan works, it is just the pagination process that cannot perform the pagination with it.
I suggest you open a technical support ticket through our website, so an agent can look into it and maybe put a request for an enhancement to the software.
For the example I chose a rather tiny space to show the result more easily. It can also be a rowspan in a bigger space as a rowspan will not be split up under any circumstances it seems as it is seen as a single cell.
So, for me the only solution was (and still is) to implement an entire browser text reflow strategy that will split up text properly per line and split up a table whenever necessary, which I already created, with hopefully all the possible use cases for text reflow.
As with <td>-elements, <td>-elements with the attribute rowspan applied to them will not be split over multiple <tr>-elements when the content of the <td>-element or of the <tr>-elements existing in the number of rows the <tr>-element span won’t fit on a single page.
Please feel free to submit a ticket via the support portal in case you would like OL Support to submit an Improvement Request for this.
