3 ms·

I don't think you're understanding the essence of the problem. It's not that they don't know how to count words, it's that the actual limit they are trying to

I don't think you're understanding the essence of the problem. It's not that they don't know how to count words, it's that the actual limit they are trying to enforce is an x,y bounding box on the page. At the end of the day, this application has to print out on a specified number of pages, in a specified format. If your limit is x,y space, then any "x number of words" limit will, by definition, not match up to reality some fraction of the time. One thing that they could do is switch to a monospace font for the text box, then at least they could specify a fixed number of characters. Now that I think about it, that wouldn't necessarily work either, because of word wrapping. The best case would probably be to tweak the font size to allow a fixed number of words to fit in the box.

asnyder 16y ago
I see, I still don't see an issue. Is there a reason why they can't push text that doesn't fit into another page. I remember when I was younger I did work for a heating company that did boiler inspections in NY. The NYC DOB has specific forms that you had to fill out and specific places for your text. In cases where the text overflowed beyond the 8 or so alloted lines, we were able to create a duplicate page and continue in a copy of the form with the remainder of information. We could this as much as we needed to, so long as the information was in the proper form. This seems like the same logic would be applicable here too. Limit to 150 words, and if it's beyond the page, simply finish on another page. Alternatively, like you said, you could figure out the necessary font-size based on the word-count, length, or even client's sizing information.
- tibbon 16y ago
  Or better yet, figure out the rough maximum worse case scenario for word length and just leave extra space on the printed area. If every word was 8 characters, and you had 150, then leave room for 1500 characters instead of 1200 on the print area. If it still goes over, dynamically scale the font size down on that section by up to 1pt to make it fit. Or like you said, offer logic to have additional pages printed if needed.

asnyder 16y ago

I see, I still don't see an issue. Is there a reason why they can't push text that doesn't fit into another page. I remember when I was younger I did work for a heating company that did boiler inspections in NY. The NYC DOB has specific forms that you had to fill out and specific places for your text. In cases where the text overflowed beyond the 8 or so alloted lines, we were able to create a duplicate page and continue in a copy of the form with the remainder of information. We could this as much as we needed to, so long as the information was in the proper form. This seems like the same logic would be applicable here too. Limit to 150 words, and if it's beyond the page, simply finish on another page. Alternatively, like you said, you could figure out the necessary font-size based on the word-count, length, or even client's sizing information.

tibbon 16y ago
Or better yet, figure out the rough maximum worse case scenario for word length and just leave extra space on the printed area. If every word was 8 characters, and you had 150, then leave room for 1500 characters instead of 1200 on the print area. If it still goes over, dynamically scale the font size down on that section by up to 1pt to make it fit. Or like you said, offer logic to have additional pages printed if needed.