Question

Description of Application:
I have an application that allows a user to output a report to a document. The data that is written to the document is in the form of a table. The number of columns in the table and the width of the strings contained in each cell in the table are unknown until runtime (it depends on what query the user runs, what they want to see in the report etc.).

I’m using Delphi XE and Gnostice’s eDocEngine to create a PDF document, and then creating a table in the document and writing the report data into it.

Problem:
The problem that I’m having is that you can only write a certain number of columns (6 or 7) into the document before they disappear off the right hand side of the document. It isn’t unknown for a user to produce a report with 30 or 40 columns in the table (as they correspond to fields in a database, which they run a query over), so I need to be able to get the table to fit entirely into the document, no matter how many columns it contains.

As a PDF can be zoomed, I suppose I could shrink the font size and column widths down and fit everything in that way, as the user could then zoom in and scroll around the table using their PDF reader. What I need to know is:

1. Is there a better way of getting the entire table to fit onto a page?
2. If shrinking/zooming is the best/only way of doing this, what is the most efficient way of ensuring that everything fits without making the document look strange (i.e. the table should ideally stretch across the page, rather than be bunched up to the left hand side because of some random scaling algorithm).

Edit
I’ve just done some more digging around and I’ve found “inputXRes” and “inputYRes” properties that change the scale of the canvas in the document, which looks promising, but I can’t get it to work properly at the moment. Can anyone shed any light on how those properties are used? The text itself is scaling, but the size of the table stays the same, meaning that I’ve now got a tiny piece of text in the middle of a huge table cell, and the table is still only displaying 7 columns in the report.

Answer 1

Don’t mess with scaling and font size.

Your customers will use PDF Reader and there are some options that will help to read the informations e.g. 1:1. But when you change the scaling or font size you cannot read the information, because it is too small.

Get a font size that fits perfect the needs of your customers and extend the page size to fit the table size.

With PDF Reader your customers will have the choice to view and print (shrink to fit) as they like and which paper size their print can handle.

BTW:
If you change the resolution and draw a line with a length of 2 inch on the canvas it will be 2 inch long, but a text with font size 12 (pixels) will grow or shrink.