Scripsit Scott Bryce:
Chris wrote:
>I have a 2 line display in a report and find if I don't put something
like a white dot (.) when data doesn't appear that the display
doesn't appear correctly. This works fine when viewing on the
website but when the user prints it prints out the . Is there
something else I can use instead of the . so it doesn't appear when
printed out and maintains the same effect on the website.
I'm not entirely clear what you want, but I would guess that replacing
the . with would accomplish this.
Oh guessing day, oh guessing day... but it seems we guessed the same.
The OP probably has a _table_ with an empty cell, and he's using the "."
character, with color set to white (the same as the declared or
wildly-guessed background color) to make the dot invisible. This is one
tricky way of making the cell non-empty from a browser's point of view,
but it fails in normal (black & white) printing, where text in any color
but black appears in grey.
Using the no-break space as non-empty content is indeed one of the
common ways to avoid the problems of empty cells. As a potential
technical drawback, it imposes minimum width and height requirements for
the cell, thought these matter relatively rarely.
However, especially in a report, it could be essential to indicate _why_
the cell lacks real data. Is the data unavailable? Too small to be
indicated? Too unreliable? Logically impossible? Secret? There are
conventions on such matters, and applying an applicable convention, with
applicable explanations when applicable, might be more applicable than
any tricks.
A URL would really have helped. But here's a URL for a page containing a
general explanation of the (assumed) issue:
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/emptycells.html
--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/ 
