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

[Andreas J Guelzow <aguelzow@math.concordia.ab.ca>]

On Mon, 2008-06-30 at 17:11 +0200, David Faure wrote:
> 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 :)

This behaviour sounds rather strange to me. I believe to understand that
"empty" in Calc means that there is no content (rather than that there
is neither content nor styles.) If this is a correct interpretation than
how does one use Calc to print forms that have formatting but not
necessarily content on every printable page? I am sure there are spread
sheet users that will print pages that contain only borders, background
colors (and perhaps "repeated rows or columns").

Andreas