centering on an en dash in a table cell ... ??

Forum|Forum|15 years ago
June 9, 2011
2 replies
1995 views

I haven't used FrameMaker for awhile, but in earlier versions I was able to center number ranges in table cells - centering on the en dash. So:

144–34

3–333

would appear perfectly centered with the en dash in the center of all cells in a table.

I can't figure out how to make this happen in FrameMaker 10. Any thoughts on this or help would be appreciated.

Jennifer

This topic has been closed for replies.

L

Lynne A. Price

Inspiring

Wow, I gotta say I'm shocked by this one.

As Rajat noted, it seems to have been introduced with the introduction of Unicode support in FM8 and still exists in FM12.

Setting the alignment character in an EDD doesn't work. Nor does opening an FM7 MIF file. I could not find a way to specify the en dash in MIF.

Michael's recommendation of a right tab seems to be the best workaround.

--Lynne

Michael_Müller-Hillebrand

Legend

Hi Jennifer,

I see what happens.

When you define a decimal tab position, you enter the alignment character. The en-dash is represented in dialog boxes as \=. Entering this or Alt+0150 in e.g. FrameMaker 7.2 work as expected.

FrameMaker 9 (which I used to test the behaviour) and apparently FrameMaker 10 limit the length of the alignment character field to a single character and apparently get it wrong with those special two-character representations of certain characters, like the en-dash. I would think, this is a bug.

The good solution requires a single tab character in front of the number, the workaround requires two tab positions and two tab chars: a right-aligned at your centering position and a left aligned just a little bit to the right. I have

2.0cm R

2.005cm L

and the cell content would be

<tab>144–<tab>34

<tab>3–<tab>333

- Michael

Van Kurtz

Inspiring

Michael and Jennifer,

When you define a decimal tab position, you enter the alignment character. The en-dash is represented in dialog boxes as \=. Entering this or Alt+0150 in e.g. FrameMaker 7.2 work as expected.
FrameMaker 9 (which I used to test the behaviour) and apparently FrameMaker 10 limit the length of the alignment character field to a single character and apparently get it wrong with those special two-character representations of certain characters, like the en-dash. I would think, this is a bug.

Did you try entering the en dash in body text, then copying and pasting it in the dialog box? I am thinking that FM9 is unicode aware, so there might not be a need to use sequences that worked in past versions. Just a guess.

Van