Variable Text Frame Height?

[hopkinsprinting]

Hello hive mind,

I have a postcard where the only variable data is the mailing address block. The text frame containing the address block will have a white background and the vertical text alignment will be set to bottom. Within the data source are two columns ('Title' and 'Company' in this case). Some recipients won't have a title and/or company. Although I will enable the suppression feature to avoid blank lines, the issue is that my customer wants the white text frame to reduce in height when the Title and/or Company fields for a particular recipient is/are blank so there isn't a bunch of unused white space. As far as I know, only the height of the text frame would need to change.

Can this be done?

Thank you,
hp

[ThomasLewis]

On older versions of FusionPro you needed the Producer or API version to do this. On version 13+ this should work on all versions.

Basically you just need to figure out your line height or leading that you need to reduce by and then change the y and height attributes of a white frame behind the text. I would avoid resizing the address text frame itself as you may run into issues with the top lines being omitted but a line break still being present which will cause some copyfitting issues.

The following code would go into OnRecordStart.

var lineheight = 1440; //leading in hundredths
var whitebox = FindTextFrame("whitebox");
var adjustment = 0;

if (!Field("Company"))
	adjustment += lineheight;

if (!Field("Title"))
	adjustment += lineheight;

whitebox.y += adjustment;
whitebox.height -= adjustment;

I've attached an example.

variable_white_box.zip

[hopkinsprinting]

Hi Thomas,

Your suggestion worked like a charm!

Best regards,
hp