Spot Markers in PDF - Anyone know what they represent

Focal Point

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April 17, 2008, 05:54 AM

hammo1j

Spot Markers in PDF - Anyone know what they represent

As an old ex-mainframer I was pleased to see that spot markers on PDF still work but what do they represent?

In the old days characters were all fixed in size so a spot marker meant the column number.

Now with variable space around the character, bold and italic, and proportional fonts this does not apply.

So what does <60 represent?

I am currently just using spot markers and adjusting by trial and error but it would be nice to know the underlying theory!

Regards

John

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April 17, 2008, 06:24 AM

GamP

I'm guessing here, nothing firm.
It could be that the spot marker indeed indicates the column number of where the subsequent text is going to be placed. That would then translate to a position on the line that is equal to the number of spaces in the font that is set for that line. So, with a proportional font this would be a relatively small strecth of white space, whereas with a non-proportional font this stretch would be much larger.
If you change the font to something non-proportional, then evrything falls nicely into place again, thereby supporting this train of thought.
This may be total nonsense, but at least I tried ....

April 17, 2008, 08:29 AM

Leah

I agree with GamP, of course I've found when going to non-proportional fonts, such things as using the label option goes weird on column width errors.

April 17, 2008, 09:42 AM

mgrackin

In the WebFOCUS world the only spot marker that seems to be usful is the <+0> marker. It is used to separate text items.

I wrote two articles on HTML and PDF report design. The second article may be helpful to you to give you a jump start with positioning HEADING, FOOTING, SUBHEAD and SUBFOOT text in the WebFOCUS world.

http://www.informationbuilders.com/support/developers/htmlpdf_part2.html

April 17, 2008, 04:12 PM

Francis Mariani

One of my superiors in a previous life did the following:

He set the REPORT font to Courier because it is mono-spaced.

He set the font for each report component to another font, Arial for example.

Then, when using spot markers, it appeared that the spot markers used the Courier font to figure out where to place a component while the component was displayed in the selected font.

Francis

Give me code, or give me retirement. In FOCUS since 1991

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