whitespace in a word doc

[Grant Edwards]

On 2010-07-15, Bruce <epost2 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm trying to create a word doc using win32com.

Unfortunately the phrase "word doc" is meaningless.

Exactly what format file are you trying to generate?  For example: Word97 "doc" or the
new "docx" format?

> I don't get the same whitespace as when printing the same stuff in
> the dos window. At the terminal I manage to line up the second column
> like
>
> apples          5
> pears            7
>
> I do this by adding whitespace characters to the strings in the first
> column so that their length is equal to that of the longest string in
> the first column.

Are you just generating an ASCII text file and then opening it in
word?

> I print the excact same string to word. but in the word doc somehting
> happens that messes things up like this :
>
> apples                        5
> pears               7
>
> Needless to say, this is extremely frustrating. But why does it
> happen, and how can I align the column in word?

Why?  Because word is using a viable-spaced font and the "dos window"
uses a fixed-width font.

If you want any control over the appearance of the document, you'll
have to either force word to open the file in a fixed-width font, or
you'll have to generate a file that contains formatting information.
What you appear to want is a table.

Generating RTF has worked well for me in the past:

 http://code.google.com/p/pyrtf-ng/
 http://pyrtf.sourceforge.net/

An enahanced version of pyRTF that supports EMF graphics and scaling
of graphics is available here:

  http://www.panix.com/~grante/files/python/PyRTF-0.46.tar.gz

If you want to generate graphics, this might be worth a look

  http://pyemf.sourceforge.net/ 
  
You might also be able to generate HTML and then open that file using
Word.


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Grant Edwards               grant.b.edwards        Yow! The Osmonds!  You are
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