Relative sizes of sub-reports and containers?

[George-Bowyer]

Hi,

What are the rules concerning the relative sizes of sub-reports and the "child" containers that they fit into?

If I have a sub-report with a detail width of 3cm, can the "child" container on the main report be width 3cm without obscuring detail in the sub-report or does it have to be a little wider?

If wider, how much by?

Many thanks

 

[theDBguy]

Hi. Just a guess, but I think the container also needs room for the margins.

 

[George-Bowyer]

Is that the left and right "padding" in the child container's properties?

 

[theDBguy]

Is that the left and right "padding" in the child container's properties?

No. The margins settings in the report object you assigned to the control.

 

[CJ_London]

might also need to allow room for scrollbars - allow .5cm

 

[George-Bowyer]

No. The margins settings in the report object you assigned to the control.

Ah. We're talking about the page margins on the sub-reports? I never even look at them on sub-reports. They should be set to 0, presumably?

 

[CJ_London]

just appreciated we are talking sub reports on a report, not a form - so unlikely scrollbars will be a problem

 

[theDBguy]

Ah. We're talking about the page margins on the sub-reports? I never even look at them on sub-reports. They should be set to 0, presumably?

Hi. Depending on printer drivers, I rarely see a page margin set to 0".

 

[George-Bowyer]

just appreciated we are talking sub reports on a report, not a form - so unlikely scrollbars will be a problem

I am producing a report to be printed as a directory of names and addresses of clubs and their members, printed in four columns.

Each column is a separate sub-report and I need every single available millimetre of space on the page, so the less I can waste on margins and padding, the better.

At the moment, when I open the report in "report view" (something I almost never use), it is showing scroll bars below the sub reports, so I obviously haven't got it right yet. This is affecting the way it prints out, in that not all of the information is always visible.

I was hoping that there was going to be a nice easy answer or formula as to how wide a child-report container had to be to exactly fit a sub-report?

What is even more annoying is that there are inconsistencies depending on the range of data being printed.

I have a button on each club page which opens the main report filtered to just that club so that you can see the layout in print-preview. However, if you open the whole report unfiltered in print-preview, the same page is occasionally formatted differently.

 

[CJ_London]

it is showing scroll bars below the sub reports

that is probably because the whole report cannot be displayed on screen - I was referring to vertical scrollbars you might get in a sub report, not the main report. If you open the report in report view you will probably also see the vertical scrollbar if the report is taller than window it appears in. Only way you can really know is if you actually print it.

how wide a child-report container had to be to exactly fit a sub-report

if i'm understanding this correctly the main report can be the same width as the subreport providing the subreport left value is 0. You can turn off scrollbars.

A4 paper is 210mm wide - less say 2 x 5mm for margins leaves 200mm so assuming your subforms have no gaps between them, the maximum width is 50mm.

Have you considered printing to PDF, then print the pdf to printer - a bit more work but makes handling scaling easier. Alternatively just have 3 columns rather than 4.

Another option perhaps is to uses the columns facility of a report rather than using subforms

 

[George-Bowyer]

Hi, thanks for the reply.

The columns have to be sub-reports (and there have to be 4) because each column is showing different information from different queries (and are also different widths), which is also why, I think, that the columns facility will not help me.

I do print to PDF (because that's the format that the publisher requires - this gets printed into a proper bound volume) and that has its own problems as the PDF format does not seem to be always identical to that produced by printing direct from the db. Things appear to get slightly changed in translation.

if i'm understanding this correctly the main report can be the same width as the subreport providing the subreport left value is 0. You can turn off scrollbars.

Hmm. I'm obviously not explaining myself very well.

I have an A4 report generating a page for each club with 4 different columns, each column being a sub report, showing different information generated from a different query.

Lets assume that with page margins and gaps between columns I have 16cm of printable space on the A4 page. I want to use as much of the space as possible.

So, can I set the widths of the sub-reports themselves AND the widths of the child-report-controls in the main report THE SAME, at, for example, 5cm, 4cm, 4cm and 3cm exactly?

Or, do I have to set the sub-reports smaller than the main report child-controls? For example, sub-report at 4.5cm and the main report control at 5cm, etc, or whatever?

If it has to be different, how do I work out what the difference is?

 

[isladogs]

I thought I understood what you meant but your last post has confused me totally!

You said you needed available space but referred to 16cm 'available space'.
Have you considered using landscape orientation?

 

[CJ_London]

perhaps provide a screenshot of what you want. To me it is straightforward

you want a subreport control width of 5cm - that means the sub report itself has a maximum width of 5cm - i.e. the sum of the left and width properties of the rightmost control should be a maximum of 5cm. I would also use transparent borders for the subreport control - they will take up a couple of pixels. I would also set using vba code using twips - there are 566.93 twips per centimetre. The reason for the odd number is the value is based on 1440 twips per inch - US sizing has a slight advantage in accuracy.

If this is going to a printer for printing, I presume you are using something like adobe - the print to pdf resolution is simply not good enough for a catalog print (I do a 100+ page catalogue for a motor parts manufacturer).

 

[zeroaccess]

If this is going to a printer for printing, I presume you are using something like adobe - the print to pdf resolution is simply not good enough for a catalog print (I do a 100+ page catalogue for a motor parts manufacturer).

It would be so easy for Microsoft to offer more than just screen and print options in its OutputTo method. I believe screen uses the E-mail preset and print uses the Print preset as shown here:
https://www.access-programmers.co.u...ook-ugly-jpeg-compression.309517/post-1668954

Access to the HD option would be nice and would take MS just a few minutes to add to the next update.

I suppose one idea would be to save as a .docx and tell Word to invoke a macro to do the Save As with the highest quality settings.

 

[CJ_London]

To clarify.. when I said If this is going to a printer for printing, I meant sending a pdf to a commercial printing company