Cell width not accurate

I'm new to BIRT and toying with it in order to evaluate it's usefulness in a production environment.
I have made a couple of reports that have worked fairly well, but now I'm trying to make a report with vertical lines, which demands that I can specify cell width precisely across different report elements such as tables and lists.
Unfortunately I cannot get this to work - the cells does not get the same width.
I hope there is a logical explanation for this.
If someone will take a look at my sample (no data source attached but still illustrates the problem) and possibly come up with an explanation, I will be grateful.

Best Regards
Steffen Rugtved

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mwilliams

Hi Steffen Rugtved,

What version of BIRT are you using?

mwilliams

Steffen,

I figured out the version by opening it up. Using fixed width like that, you'll most likely need to specify the width of all the columns in the grid to match the width of the table.

Rugtved

Hi Michael

Thanks for looking into this.
I'm aware of that I may have to specify all column widths and that is fine, but what I don't get is that I have two cells (element ID 1222 and 1176) both with a fixed width of 6 cm. but when rendered they don't maintain that width.
On PDF, I measure the first to 5.9 cm and the second to 5,6!

All suggestions are most welcome.

Regards
Steffen

mwilliams

Steffen,

I noticed the same thing until I had sized all of the columns to fit properly. When I did that, they seemed to be the same size on my screen.

Rugtved

Michael,

Thanks for your suggestion.
It appears to be working to some extent - the columns now have the same width albeit not the width I have specified ;-)

I have attached a new reportdesign and the corresponding PDF. When I print the PDF file, I measure the three columns as 56, 12 and 25 mm totalling 93 mm for the entire grid, where I have specified 60, 13, 27 and 100 mm.

If BIRT should have any merit as a professional reporting system, there must be an explanation for this.

Best regards
Steffen

mwilliams

Steffen,

I'll take a look at it. It may be cell padding and what not that is there by default and BIRT is shrinking the columns to make it work.

mwilliams

Steffen,

There are a few cells with padding on them still. Also coming into play on the missized columns could be the fact that your table is set to 250mm across. The 8 inches of report space between the 0.25 inch margins on the report is only about 203mm. You may fix those things and measure again to see if it improves. Are you actually printing these to paper to measure the column width? Or just trusting that the PDF display is 100% correct?

Rugtved

Hi Michael

I have followed your suggestions: removed all padding and resized the table to 100 mm but the result is still very disappointing.

The table measures 93 mm on print (from PDF attached). In my mind 7% deviation is a lot when it comes to professional reporting.

I have attached the design and pdf with the latest corrections in the hope that you or someone else can solve this.

Best regards
Steffen

mwilliams

Hi Steffen,<br />
<br />
Please log a bug for this at <a class='bbc_url' href='http://www.eclipse.org/birt/phoenix/reportabug.php'>BIRT: Reporting Bugs and Requesting Enhancements</a>. Include that last report design that you posted in here in your bug report. You may also want to make reference to this forum thread to help describe the issue. Thanks.

Rugtved

Thanks Michael

I have now posted: "[Bug 286898] Specific cell widths are not accurate when printed from PDF".

Best Regards
Steffen

mwilliams

Thanks Steffen!

Rugtved

It turns out that page scaling when printing was set.

After changing the page layout to A4 everything fits perfectly.

/Steffen

mwilliams

Good to know! Thanks for the update.