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Macro to make columns in table of uniform width

Posted: 2013-09-25 00:27:40
by NisusUser
Hi, all.

I searched the forums, but didn't find anything on this. Is there a macro to force the columns in a table to be all the same width? Or is there another easy way to do this with NWP (2.0.5)?

Attached is a file that shows that the first column is slightly narrower than the other two, thus the text, though uniform in all three columns, takes up more lines in column one.

I think this is happening because the files are being imported into NWP from MS WORD files.

Thanks.

Re: Macro to make columns in table of uniform width

Posted: 2013-09-25 00:30:55
by NisusUser
Ah, I see! Select the Table and then use the Table > Distribute Columns Evenly command. Not so hard after all! An aside: is there a way to see numerically the widths of the columns and tweak them?

Re: Macro to make columns in table of uniform width

Posted: 2013-09-25 07:04:15
by phspaelti
NisusUser wrote:An aside: is there a way to see numerically the widths of the columns and tweak them?
Yes. Since the last update the Nisus Macro language has commands to check and modify various table cell attributes, including the width. You should look in the macro reference (in the help menu).

I haven't had much time to try these things yet, but here is a macro that will give the width of the columns of a the first table in the document. This should give an idea how to start to write a macro that can change the width in the desired way.
Table Width test.nwm
(16.42 KiB) Downloaded 878 times

Re: Macro to make columns in table of uniform width

Posted: 2013-09-25 13:02:45
by martin
NisusUser wrote:is there a way to see numerically the widths of the columns and tweak them?
Not using the regular interface, but as Philip says, macros recently gained this functionality.

Here's a macro that shows you the column widths for the selected table and lets you adjust them numerically. As an aside, the macro name "Table Column Width Adjuster" may seem awkward, but once you build up a lot of macros I've found it's very useful to have the names start with a relevant noun. It's very slow to go through a list of macros starting with generic verbs like "Change", "Convert", "Create", etc.

Re: Macro to make columns in table of uniform width

Posted: 2013-09-25 20:36:53
by NisusUser
Thank you to both of you for your help!