Edit content textbox - size of the tabulator - aligning

[yogi108]

Hi,

If I edit the content of a textbox using a non proportional font (no "courier new", just arial etc.) what is the best
way to have a sort of vertical aligning like a column?
A tabulator seems to have a fixed size of about 1,3 cm, didn´t find an option to change it.

Sample:

Column1...........Column2.............Column3
Cell1................Cell2......................Cell3

Normal text about

Column2 and Cell2 should vertically align, also Column3 and Cell3.

If I use the tabulator - which works of course - it is too much white space for me.

Thanks,
kind regards,

PS: I know that the PDF Editor is not like "Word"

[Tracker Supp-Stefan]

Hello yogi108,

PDFs are way more complex than text files - and there are some specification limitations that would restrict us in what we can offer.
What you want to achieve would ideally be done with you e.g. using a separate text box/typewriter object for each column - this way you can align them individually.
There's no provision for column ordered and aligned text inside the same block in the specification - so achieving it in one text box is not possible with a non uniform width font.

Regards,
Stefan

[yogi108]

Hello yogi108,

PDFs are way more complex than text files - and there are some specification limitations that would restrict us in what we can offer.
What you want to achieve would ideally be done with you e.g. using a separate text box/typewriter object for each column - this way you can align them individually.
There's no provision for column ordered and aligned text inside the same block in the specification - so achieving it in one text box is not possible with a non uniform width font.

Regards,
Stefan

Hi Stefan,

I understand, maybe you can consider to make the standard size of the tabulator more flexible - maybe for each text box - would help a lot!

Thanks and
kind regards,

[Will - Tracker Supp]

Hi Yogi,

We'll pass that along and take that into consideration.

Cheers,

[yogi108]

Hi Yogi,

We'll pass that along and take that into consideration.

Cheers,

Hi Will,

Thanks a lot!

kind regards,

[Will - Tracker Supp]

[Puffolino]

Still unsure what's the best practise to "simulate" tabulators. I've enclosed a PDF document which has two lines from a table where some adaptions need to be done. One of the editing tasks is to add a text in the second row below the (tabbed) text of the first row.

I don't know how to do this easily - actually I copy and paste the text "25,0" as a comment, then I could try to align it (using guides) before flatten the text (after that, snapping to guides doesn't work).

I also have some problems keeping the layout when doing some other editing, like making the first "25,0" bold or adding some content in the first row...

...what would you do to get the perfect text?

Entest.pdf

(33.32 KiB) Downloaded 50 times

[Tracker Supp-Stefan]

Hello Michael,

Looking at your sample - the first line with "63.00 25.00 47.25 47.25" is a single text element - so is the bottom line with the 'empty' space.

I managed to get to here:

With removing the spacings available onthe second line, and copying the spaces from the first one. (then I copied the space between 10.09 and 201.80, and pasted it on the above line when I added 1 to 47.25 to make it 147.25.

The thing is that the text has already been formatted and it in text elements that are hard to manipulate in the way you want them to.

Changing to Bold will make the 25 on the first line wider - so this will affect the formatting of everything else weird.

Maybe redacting all of those digits out, and then placing them on top with e.g. the typewriter tool, and then flattening that after you have them correctly positioned might be the easiest and quickest solution.

Regards,
Stefan

[Puffolino]

Thanks Stefan,
the "25,00" for the second line can be done relatively exactly as I wrote before (using zoom and Ctrl+Shift+Cursor keys), the only tricky thing is to select the object (best done with the object pane on the left side) and keep it selected until the document window gets active (otherwise the cursor keys won't affect the comment object)...

Doing the "Bold" and "Inserting" things is more complicated as I am not able to resize the box without distorting the text as well. I tried different things when changing the box size:
while text comments are only stretched when the object is selected but not when the text cursor is active, the behaviour for text objects is unpredictable (for me). It would be fine to increase the box size to have get space (for adding characters, etc.).

Still playing around...

[Tracker Supp-Stefan]

Hello Michael,

Yes - because there are "tabbed spaces" in the text that are with a fixed size - it's hard to edit that particular sample file 'cleanly'. The easiest would be to redact those numbers out completely, and then place in their place e.g. typewriter objects with the needed columns of text.

Regards,
Stefan

[Puffolino]

Still fighting with the edit possibilities from time to time, you'll see a simple example where just one character is needed to be changed and another one to be deleted...

...without the "Edit Text Elements as Blocks" strategy it is nearly impossible to do such things (at least for me). The best method for me is to disable this blocking (!) mode, select the single text line, cut the text, create a new empty page, paste the text in the clipboard, activate block mode, edit the text, cut it again, swap to the original document, paste it...

Quite complicate (and still not perfect as the page number is seen together with the text within a line), but at least a way to do changes here - wouldn't it be brilliant when the program could act like this automatically?

Test.pdf

(27.13 KiB) Downloaded 53 times