I'm after something similar. We are sending output from a merge to a virtual printer which takes the output and puts it into our electronic document imaging system.
While the actual printout and print-to-PDF options work just fine, when sent to the generic/text only printer the table is converted to text, which is expected, but unless each column has the same number of spaces the alignment is messed up.
In other software like Excel this is easy to fix; I would change the field to be something like:
Code:
mergefield + space(80-len(field))
currently it looks like this:
Column1 Column2 Column3
Item1 desc $1234 $123
Item2 description $2341 $234
Item3 $4567 $456
I can't use len unfortunately. Another possible issue is that the mergefield is actually a collection of items separated with a CR/LF.
For example, <<item>> the merge field, when populated, looks like this:
Item Line1 CR/LF
Item Line2 with more info CR/LF
Item Line 3 still different length than Line1 & Line2 CR/LF
I need to add spaces after Line1 & Line2 so they -at least- match the length of Line3 (or some static character length that suits, like 80). Again, this is in order to make Column 2 line up and not be "jagged". I will need to repeat this for the other columns as well.
I don't believe I can have the user change the source data to match my requirements. I'm also fine if this requires some scripting in a macro, I'm just not sure how to get "there" from "here".