Joe wrote:
> I think the real problem is that many fonts are proportional, so, for
these, there is really no such thing as a uniform character width. This
is compounded by the fact that you can change the font and size in any
cell, so doing anything based on character width would be a big kludge
that would probably get more people mad than happy. I can't imagine how
it works in th M$ products.
Very badly.
One thing we often have to do at where I work is to take an Excel
spreadsheet supplied by a client and save it in DBF format. Unless you
want your data to be truncated, if you are using Excel you must first
set the font to a fixed-width font such as Courier New at 10 point size
and then do auto-formatting.
This is necessary because MS Excel stupidly calculates the size of the
resultant DBF fields based on the size of the columns in Excel as they
are displayed, not on the basis of the maximum length of the data in
each cell in characters. It then insists on translating to whatever the
MS-DOS code page is set up to, in our case 850. But that can mean loss
or changes in characters not found in Code Page 850.
Calc has none of these problems. It sets field length in each output DBF
field to the length of characters of whatever cell in the column has the
most characters and always asks what code page the spreadsheet is in and
produces output in Windows appropriately.
Jallan
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