Non Proporcional fonts calculation

[Bill Campbell]

On Mon, Mar 12, 2012, Kenneth Brody wrote:
>On 3/12/2012 10:13 AM, Henry Arredondo wrote:
>> Hi, I'm using Arial size 10 on a report ($1b (s1p10v0s0b16602T)) is there
>> a formula to calculate the spacing on a report when using non
>> proportional fonts?
>
>"What they said."  :-)
>
>What, exactly, are you trying to accomplish?  If you want to align columns 
>of the report while still using a proportional font, perhaps the way to go 
>is to use a print code to set the horizontal position at the start of each 
>column, thereby making the width of the preceding text irrelevant.

The best way I've found to get things right when using proportional fonts
is to have the report create groff or perhaps LaTex input, then let that do
the heavy lifting.

Producing pretty output is far from trivial as Donald Knuth said in the
introduction of the TeX Book.  He spent quite a lot of effort in designing
a system to create 'pretty books'.

Personally I use groff rather than TeX as I learned it almost 30 years ago,
and it works well for me.

One of my first major products doing this was was to produce photo-ready
copy for a two-column auction catalog created from a database and using the
-ms macros as it was the easiest to do multi-page multi-column tables.

Bill
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