Re: [office] Public comment #20 -- default print range in tables

[David Faure <faure@kde.org>]

On Monday 30 June 2008, Eike Rathke wrote:
> Hi Robert,
> 
> On Sunday, 2008-06-29 15:56:53 -0400, Robert Weir wrote:
> 
> > [... "used area of the table" ...]
> > 
> > We could define it as "The smallest rectangular range which contains all 
> > cells with background color, formula, value, or border".
> > 
> > But is that true?  Or do applications print the range from A1 (upper left) 
> > to the row/column that encloses the furthest visible content?  In other 
> > words, the smallest rectangular region which contains cell A1 and all 
> > cells with  background color, formula, value, or border.
> 
> This is what Calc does. Printout doesn't have to start from A1 though.
> If the top left data cell was X234 the printout could start there as
> well. However, the top left cell is not necessarily printed on the top
> left of the first page, page calculation is done as if empty pages were
> printed, so the top left cell may as well reside in the middle of the
> first page. Also, if there's only formatting without any data in cells, 
> pages are skipped to not end up with 1000 or so coloured pages just
> because an entire column had some background colour applied.

This behavior seems sensible.

I have asked myself, is this app-specific behavior or should it be in the spec?
The difference it makes is: if you send a document to someone else and tell
them "print this!", then a difference in behavior between two applications would
indeed break interoperability somewhat; the receiving user will print something rather
different than what the sender of the document intended. Page breaks at
a different place could rather ruin the printed document.
So, contrary to my first reaction of "this is app-specific behavior", I believe
it is useful to have this in the specification. I'm CC'ing the main KSpread developer
in case he disagrees, though :)

-- 
David Faure, faure@kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).