Sliding/Printing issue...

[moonunit]

Hello!

I have a multi-tabled solution which is aimed at producing a template for budget creation.

The tables are related to a budget report layout which consists of a hell of a lot of calc fields inside a single record. [4 or 5 calc fields representing each budget line.]

In a nutshell, the problem is that with sliding/printing enabled, in Preview the report layout appears uneven where calc fields produce a "" result...

Or to be a little more precise, where 2 (or more) consecutive lines of field calcs produce "" [blanks], whilst the sliding up works, a gap appears between valid fields above and below - it's not a 2-line gap, it's more like half a line's height.

Why?

And there's one further problem. One of the [line] calc fields is a percentage which is number formatted to not display if zero. When coupled with the round function, any score below 1% does not display – which all in all means that the sliding up (on this column) is even wilder because there are more empty fields above.

I'm sure somebody knows exactly why sliding/printing leaves a space when fields are apparently empty - or is the key in the word 'apparent'?

Thanks in advance.

MU

[moonunit]

For the record, through trial and error persistence I've resolved my problem and I thought I'd share it here - just in case somebody else suffers a sliding/printing issue like mine!

What I hadn't explained – because I hadn't identified it as a potential cause – is that each budget line comprises of 3 font-sizes. So fields 1 and 3 are at 12pt; fields 2 and 5, 10pt and field 4 @ 9pt.

FMP automatically creates a field on a layout according to the font height - a 12pt font automatically produces a 14px high box, whereas 9pt produces 11px high.

I let FMP produce these unequal field-boxes and lined them all up neatly according to a perceived common base-line. When sliding/printing was enabled, everything slid absolutely properly, but it looked like it hadn't. And then I asked why!

As I've discovered, if a smaller box is positioned beside a bigger font box, and sliding/printing is enabled, the blank space within the boxes is removed correctly. The problem is NOT the sliding/printing but actually the 3px of white space differential above – 3px which accumulates as multiple fields (above) return "", empty.

The fix is to manually resize the height of any smaller font field to the same height as the biggest font field. Simple as that! FMP still removes the blank space from each field, but assuming the field-columns are lined up properly, there is no white-space remainder left behind...

The second problem I referred to, relating to percentage fields , was caused by my mixing the Sliding Up requests. Once I selected "All above" for the whole of the layout, chaotic sliding is a thing of the past.

All done! Next problem please!