You're right Steve, tabs will fail if the text just before the tab overruns a tab stop, which will force you into the next tab stop.
What you can do is use spaces. Set up a local variable that contains nothing but 80 spaces. Then, to output a column of text, use: <@LEFT STR="<@VAR MYVAR><@VAR LOCAL$SPACES>" NUMCHARS=20> This will pad the text to exactly 20 chars wide. (You could automatically size the columns by first finding the maximum string width for each of your columns and then adding 1 to that number.) This should work fine... however, you will still run into problems if the user has their email client set up to use a proportional font by default. In this case, an HTML table would really be the only consistent way to layout in columns... or, tell your clients that "Comic Sans MS" isn't really a good choice for a default font! :) Todd >Does anyone know of any tricks to use when attempting to format the body of >an email action. I don't want to use HTML as the content type, I need to >stay with plain text. > >What I'm looking for isn't exactly page layout, I just want to position a >couple of rows of returned data in columnar format so that one row's data >falls immediately below the row above. I've tried using tabs but they aren't >consistent. > >Any ideas? > >Steve Smith > >Skadt Information Solutions >Office: (519) 624-4388 >GTA: (416) 606-3885 >Fax: (519) 624-3353 >Cell: (416) 606-3885 >Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >Web: http://www.skadt.com > >________________________________________________________________________ >TO UNSUBSCRIBE: send a plain text/US ASCII email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > with unsubscribe witango-talk in the message body -------------------------------------------------------------- Todd Trann, B.S.E.E., B.Sc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] Programmer / Analyst ph (306) 966-2610 Student & Enrolment Services fax (306) 966-5092 University Of Saskatchewan http://www.usask.ca/sas/ ________________________________________________________________________ TO UNSUBSCRIBE: send a plain text/US ASCII email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe witango-talk in the message body
