How to Specify the Width of Columns in Acrobat PDF Format Reports

Modifying the Standard Section

By default, the reports in Spira typically have an XHTML table that is used to display a report of tabular data:

<table class="DataGrid" style="width:100%">
      <tr>
        <th>Req #</th>
        <th>Name</th>
        <th>Type</th>
        <th>Status</th>
        <th>Release #</th>
        <th>Test Traceability</th>
        <th>Requirements Traceability</th>
      </tr>

....
rest of table

when this is rendered as an Acrobat PDF table, each of the cells will be same, standard width.

If you want to specify a specific table width, you cannot use standard HTML attributes on the <td> or <th> tags such as:

• style="width: 200px"
• width="200"

because these are not supported by other formats such as XSL-FO which is the markup language used to generate the PDF format files.

Instead, you need to use the special <colgroup> and <col> column and column group XHTML syntax. This lets you specify the width of the columns without needing to adjust each cell in the table. For example you could use:

<table class="DataGrid" style="width:100%">
   <colgroup>
     <col width="20px" />
     <col width="100px" />
     <col width="200px" />
   </colgroup>
   <tr>
      <th>Req #</th>
      <th>Name</th>
      <th>Type</th>
      <th>Status</th>
      <th>Release #</th>
      <th>Test Traceability</th>
      <th>Requirements Traceability</th>
   </tr>

....
rest of table

That will display correctly in HTML and PDF formats, with different width cells.