Dear all,
Using the new KNIME Reporting KNIME Reporting – KNIME Community Hub to create simple reports I’m facing challenges with the column width.
The col width is automatically adapted by the pdf writer based on the entries in the first rows.
Unfortunately these rows do not always contain the longest entries. So I see many pdfs where the first lines fit well the the calculated widths but other lines have entries which are just cut off at the end.
I understand that the reporting can’t respect all lines. So it would be great to have a chance to define the column widths e.g. by percentage (15/15/10/20/40).
Up to now I was not able to find such a setting. Did I miss it? Is such a setting possible?
Otherwise that might a topic to imrove.
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Hey @knimediger,
This is a very good point and a problem we couldn’t find a nice solution for. I guess in the end I personally would like to have some sort of a preview of my report and just resize the columns to the desired result. Percentage could of course also work, but I am not too sure that this is easy to figure out.
But in the end this is just about the question which unit you want to define (could also be pixels/cm/%). It boils down to the fact that you want to have fixed values for fixed columns.
This is still something we have to and want to add in the future.
Greetings,
Daniel
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@DanielBog
Thanks for your reply.
Typically I see in most tables some fixed width columns (e.g. counter, date/time). Aside these entries there is quite often information like names or even free text which may vary in length (“Ed” versus “Maria Magdalena”, “n.a.” versus “Please call us for further information”)
So it would be great to have the possibility to fix some columns (e.g. the date to =2cm or =5%) and to have either a minimum lenght (e.g. the name to >10cm or >25%) and cut longer entries (that’s what happens today)
Another big surplus would be to have the possibility to allow line breaks in longer entries. As additional support that may be used with the possibility for a max row count (e.g. maximum 3 rows) or the full data set in that column.
The fixed length may also be a undefined length (“*”) to allow that column(s) to use as much width as still available. E.g. 2cm for date, 5cm for category, * for description, * for references would give on A4: 2cm, 5cm, 7cm, 7cm. On A3 that would end up with 2cm, 5cm, 11.5cm, 11.5cm.
I did not use BIRT for a longer time. But when I’m not wrong that’s also a way there to assign the column width.
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