Re: Tabbed text wrapping when not desired (clarification)

[DW Emory <danemory@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In my earlier post on this thread, I stated:
 >1. Even though the font you're using is not monospaced, you must operate on
 >the premise that it is monospaced, thus you know exactly how many characters
 >will fit on a line for a given font size. Let's say that the characters per
 >line with this assumption is 50.

I now realize that when I used the word "exactly" above, I shouldn't have. 
What I meant to say was that you must analyze the actual average number of 
description characters per full line you are actually getting for a 
description of "average" length. The variance (or standard deviation if you 
like) in this average depends on many things, including the width of the 
text column, the font size, the average word length, and your hyphenation 
settings.

But taking all of these factors into consideration, a sampling of enough of 
the actual descriptions should provide you with a good average 
characters/full line  value, as well as the standard deviation. Obviously, 
the variance between the predicted and actual last line length increases 
for cases where the number of description lines varies substantially from 
the average length of a description.

Thus, the methodology I suggested in my previous post on this thread will 
produce some cases where the prices shouldn't have been inserted on the 
same line as the last line of the description, and other cases where the 
prices were placed on a separate line but needn't have. Clearly, the latter 
is preferable to the former. A bit of experimentation should lead to the 
determination of the optimum (not the exact) value of characters/full line 
which should be used in the algorithm which I described to determine 
whether or not the prices should be placed on a separate line.


There will, of course, be cases where the algorithm produces the wrong 
result, and those will have to be fixed manually after the MIF file is opened.


FrameMaker/FrameMaker+SGML Document Design & Database Publishing
DW Emory <danemory@globalcrossing.net>


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