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General Software Discussion / Re: Automatic document creation. How?
« on: June 13, 2011, 01:48 PM »I'm afraid there will be a few parts of the book where I'm going to want to manually move this diagram or question a little to the left or something, and I don't know how that kind of fine-tuning will work within the Access workflow. Can you advise on that?
I noticed in the online page-flipper that your diagrams and answers sometimes nearly overlap or perhaps might get in each other's way. A couple of approaches would be:
1. Standardize the layout of each question/answer/diagram group so that overlap never happens. This might cause an issue with larger diagrams, or may not be space efficient, but is definitely the easiest solution.
2. In Access, each band in a report can have VBA event code behind it. Put some "OnFormat" or "OnPrint" VBA code behind the record (the report "band") on the report itself to move/resize the diagram under certain circumstances you define. For instance, a question will be a tuple (ahem, record) of a query that joins fields from several different tables: Questions, QuestionTexts, QuestionAnswers, QuestionDiagrams, etc. If you have created a boolean field in the QuestionDiagrams table called [MoveMeImTooBig], then you can have the question record inspect that field during the printing and act to reposition or resize the diagram (or the question text or the answer radio controls group or whatever) anywhere on the report surface based on the value stored there for the diagram (or even something that occurred in the previous record when it printed).
What does indesign offer me as far as typography that Access doesn't in a report? Are the fonts, letters, paragraphs going to look better in indesign?
If your concern extends to adjusting the kerning between letters or point by point adjustment of line spacing, then Access cannot do that. A critical publisher of art books might find the Access output a bit coarse due to its inability to adjust kerning and line spacing increments. I'm betting your customers won't notice any difference.
or does it refer to the ability to move things around and place them exactly where you want?
VBA code in an Access report band can do that based on criteria it finds in the tables you design.
Do this: open Access, start an empty database, use the automatic wizards to generate one of the built-in table structures, a query based on that table, a form based on that table, and a report based on the query. Then open each object into design mode, display the properties window, click on various controls/elements, and browse through the properties supported, including the events. If that doesn't get your creative juices flowing...