* Rich Text Wide Table Templates

For Wish List Requests that have either (a) been progressed to the Wish List; or (b) been classified as duplicates, or as redundant because the requirement is already satisfied within FH and/or plugins; or (c) closed because it wasn't possible to arrive at a clear specification of the request within 15 months of it being raised.
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peterbel
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Rich Text Wide Table Templates

Post by peterbel »

I have checked and couldn't find this raised before.
Would it be possible for the templates tables to have the option to 'Shrink to Fit' ?
Removing excess column width and unfilled rows.
Tracing the Devon Bellamy family along with their partners.
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tatewise
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Re: Rich Text Wide Table Templates

Post by tatewise »

There are many, many postings discussing this problem and AS has options that help to reduce table widths.
Discussions started during the FH v7 beta testing and the problem has been reported to CP since, so they must be aware.
Presumably, it is not easy to implement a solution within the constraints of MS rich text formatting.

A Forum Search for "wide tables" lists 12 postings for 2021.
Mike Tate ~ researching the Tate and Scott family history ~ tatewise ancestry
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Mark1834
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Re: Rich Text Wide Table Templates

Post by Mark1834 »

I will assume that Peter meant he couldn’t find any reference to his specific suggestion of trimming excess column width and unused rows, rather than no reference to wide tables.

My suggestion is for Peter to experiment with filled tables. Can you get it down to a useable format manually by changing font size and/or optimising column widths? Or is there just too much information to fit in the space available?

One potential issue with Rich Text is that character width depends on font, and default screen fonts are not the same as default print fonts. That makes it difficult to optimise for both, so think about which is more important to you.
Mark Draper
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tatewise
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Re: Rich Text Wide Table Templates

Post by tatewise »

Mark, you are probably correct, but Peter probably already knows how to edit tables manually.
The point is that CP are presumably well aware of the problem and will devise their own solution.
I doubt if adding a Wish List item for such as 'Shrink to Fit' will make the slightest difference.
Mike Tate ~ researching the Tate and Scott family history ~ tatewise ancestry
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peterbel
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Re: Rich Text Wide Table Templates

Post by peterbel »

Thanks for your comments gentlemen.
As Mike has probably guessed this comes from my trying to get a Book that will print from FH. I have used the Census template quite extensively, even retrospectively, and it was only when I came to reprint a book I realised most of the tables were not a A4 fit. Going back to each one to edit it seemed something the software could do. The page width is known, blank rows aren't needed, so even though I wouldn't know how to code it, it did seem fairly straight forward. Of course CP will do what CP will do, they no doubt have a long list and probably even rank them. The Wish List is just a nudge from users. :)
Tracing the Devon Bellamy family along with their partners.
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AdrianBruce
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Re: Rich Text Wide Table Templates

Post by AdrianBruce »

peterbel wrote: 05 Jul 2021 09:21 ... Going back to each one to edit it seemed something the software could do. The page width is known, blank rows aren't needed, so even though I wouldn't know how to code it, it did seem fairly straight forward. ...
Having spent many a happy hour (not) trying to shrink tables to fit onto an A4 portrait page, the basic issue for the coders is that there is no guaranteed (automatic) method of shrinking a table to fit, that would be acceptable to all. Sure you can (and I have) define the table so that it has columns of equal width and do a simple calculation of how many columns there are, how wide the paper is and therefore how wide each column has to be... That's when you find that the result is some columns are over width (because they only contain a Y/N marker or an age say) and some are pretty much illegible because they try to cram too much text into one cell.

Put another way, the software knows the width of the paper, the number of columns, therefore the average column width to fit all the table on one sheet - but it has zero idea of the contents of each cell to know whether that's an appropriate width or not. (Well, you could start measuring the amount of data in each and every cell but even then you've no idea what the user would regard as an acceptable wrapping method).

I don't say it's impossible - just very, very hard to concoct a general method that people would agree is the least worst.
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ColeValleyGirl
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Re: Rich Text Wide Table Templates

Post by ColeValleyGirl »

tatewise wrote: 04 Jul 2021 16:34 The point is that CP are presumably well aware of the problem and will devise their own solution.
I doubt if adding a Wish List item for such as 'Shrink to Fit' will make the slightest difference.
That isn't usually a criterion for adding an item to the Wish List -- we have some items on there that IMO are never going to be fulfilled, irrespective of how popular they are; I don't think it's our job to second guess CP on some items but not others. I agree with Adrian that it's (probably) an intractable problem, but the Wish List is the mechanism we have for bringing things to CP's attention that we really care about (aka nudging them), so why not use it?

I shall raise a Wish List item with the following wording unless somebody suggests an improvement.

"A mechanism within reports to adjust the width of Rich Text tables to avoid the table overflowing the page size. It should cater for portrait and landscape pages of different sizes, and also unlimited-size pages (for use in a website, for example"). "
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NickWalker
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Re: Rich Text Wide Table Templates

Post by NickWalker »

Ancestral Source census grids will automatically resize to the narrowest possible (and there is an option to ignore the heading in that situation), but even so, there will inevitably be census grids that are too wide for A4 because they just have too many columns.

I think something could be done in a future version by CP that automatically splits a table if it goes over a page width. This is not perfect because you would then have to make sure you can match each row to the corresponding row in the next section of the table. There could perhaps be options to add numbers to the rows to help with this, or perhaps it would be possible to specify columns that repeat on each of the 'sub-tables'. Far from perfect, but I'm not sure there are any satisfactory solutions.

I could build something like that into AS to automatically split tables but this wouldn't then adapt to differing page widths - it would be annoying if you were able to print out to an A3 page but the table continued to be split because that was how it was stored in the source text. So really I think this has to be done by FH at the output stage rather than at the input stage.
Nick Walker
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https://fhug.org.uk/kb/kb-article/ancestral-sources/
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AdrianBruce
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Re: Rich Text Wide Table Templates

Post by AdrianBruce »

NickWalker wrote: 05 Jul 2021 12:01 ... there will inevitably be census grids that are too wide for A4 because they just have too many columns. ...
As an aside, that was when I gave up transcribing sources - when I tried to transcribe US census forms. The only viable method I found was to spin the "table" through 90 degrees and write each "row" as a series of pairs - header, data, new line, header, data, new line, etc. At which point I decided this wasn't really transcription!
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Mark1834
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Re: Rich Text Wide Table Templates

Post by Mark1834 »

Happy with Helen’s wording - it defines the end point without trying to tell CP how to do it.

The only tables I use at the moment are narrow 2-column tables of the parameter: value type. They work well for some sources, and for others I stick with comma-separated transcription. It is fully searchable and I can look at the image if I want the full layout. I don’t have to clone it in the transcription.
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peterbel
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Re: Rich Text Wide Table Templates

Post by peterbel »

I am happy with your wording Helen. :D
It will be interesting to see if CP do come up with a solution, how they do it.
My 'left field' solution would be to minimise spaces and unused lines, convert to an image then scale the image to fit chosen output. Haven't a clue how though !!
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AdrianBruce
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Re: Rich Text Wide Table Templates

Post by AdrianBruce »

peterbel wrote: 05 Jul 2021 17:11 ... convert to an image then scale the image to fit chosen output. ...
That's an interesting thought indeed. The screenshot below is a total lash-up to illustrate the sort of thing that might produce compared to other cases...
Screenshot 2021-07-05 205122.jpg
Screenshot 2021-07-05 205122.jpg (137.49 KiB) Viewed 5405 times
Ignore the citation heading in the middle, this is one source cited twice with three different methods of output, and I simply ended up using a screenshot that showed the end of one citation and the start of the next.

The three "images" come from source citations in a narrative report. The bottom one is the actual census image itself, linked and printed as a media item to the source. The middle item is the sort of rough, vague transcript of the census written as a table in the "Text From Source". As can be seen, it overflows the paper. The top item is a screenshot image of the "Text from Source" as seen in the Source Record itself - which is why it's a different typeface. I then linked it as a 2nd media item to the source just as a quick lash-up for printing it. The mechanism already exists for constraining the width of an image to fit to a desired width.

The (top) screenshot version of the text from source fits nicely on the paper, of course, and fits the columns, because I made the table (in the text from source) with sensible dimensions. (Notice how the printed text (middle image), despite being effectively the same thing, looks horrible because of the different typefaces - not sure if that's just my incompetence).

My biggest concern with the image, however, is that it's getting seriously small for legibility. And this is only an English & Welsh 1911, not a US format census! (Yes, I know that there are a couple of unused columns here - but they need to be printed to show that they are empty - besides, they'd have had the headings if I hadn't been too idle to add them).

So the lash up suggests that converting to an image, and shrinking that, might work for some forms but is already on the limits of legibility with a 1911 census.

In terms of practicality, the software would need to keep the Rich Text format above and below the census form (or whatever) but then convert the middle bit to an image (a vector image might be a bit clearer?). But I have no idea if the Rich Text control that CP use can accommodate an image of some sort on the fly.

Certainly an interesting thought though.
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tatewise
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Re: Rich Text Wide Table Templates

Post by tatewise »

Also, once the table is converted to an image it loses the ability to text search in the PDF or RTF report file, which is a major advantage of a table over a Media image of the Census page.
Mike Tate ~ researching the Tate and Scott family history ~ tatewise ancestry
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Re: Rich Text Wide Table Templates

Post by ColeValleyGirl »

I have created wish list item Fit Rich Text Tables to report page so you can now vote for it.
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