Text alignment help

Hello, and thanks for reading. I'll try to be concise.

In trying to format text, typical on business cards. Many layouts format with a prefix followed by the number, and include a desired space in between. Here's an example with three spaces between.

T 604.323.2323

C 604.232.3232

F 604.323.2323

Here's my code;

if (Field("Tell") == "")

return "";

else

return 'T '+Rule("TelFor");

Here are my questions;

- Fusion seems to honour just one space. If I put three ('T '), only one is applied (even in this HTML formatting). How can I apply more, or tabs?

- Characters have different kerning values. Even in my example above, the 604 do not line up, because of these values. How do I align my phone numbers?

- Is there a method to affect tracking for the entire phone number, so they align overall?

I use various cheats, but this has to be a common issue... Perhaps I missed a simple solution somewhere?

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Mike

Fusion Mac 9.2.31

-To get more than one space you need to use a non breaking space character " "

-Instead of trying multiple space, just use a tab character "<t>" and set your tab stops in paragraph settings so they all left align.

- I'm sure there's a way to calculate the width of the text and apply specific tracking with the FusionProTextMeasure function, there''s a couple examples on the boards here.

Mike, one way you can control the spacing between the identifier and the number is to put each of them in separate columns of a table and then adjust the width of the columns.

This is just some sample code that I think might help you out in this scenario:

var numbers = [
"T: " + Field("Phone"),
"C: " + Field("Cell"),
"F: " + Field("Fax")];

var idWidth = 0.5; // inches
var noWidth = 1.5; // inches


// Filter empty numbers from the array
numbers = numbers.filter(function(m){return m.replace(/[^\d]/g,'');});

// Start a table for the numbers
var myTable = new FPTable;
myTable.AddColumns(idWidth*7200, noWidth*7200);
myTable.AddRows(numbers.length); 

// Add numbers
for (var i=0; i<numbers.length; i++) {

   var id = numbers[i].replace(/([^\d]*)\d+/g,'$1');
   var no = numbers[i].replace(/[^\d]*(\d+)/g,'$1');

   myTable.Rows[i].SetContents(Trim(id), no);
}

return myTable.MakeTags();

This is great stuff! I will be exploring your advice over the next few days.

Thank you both!