Uneven row height in Reports

Question

The Table tool is producing uneven row heights.  In the attached workflow and .docx,  you can see that the row heights for Africa, Cent & S. America, and East Asia are short, compared to all the other rows.  The three short rows all have arrows in both columns;  the tall rows either have no arrows or an arrow in only one column.

Is there a way to get uniform row heights when using arrows?

Thanks.

test2.xlsx

Uneven Row Height.yxmd

Uneven Row Height.docx

DavidP · Answer

Hi @Newt

This is an interesting and also very annoying problem - I've been thinking it over for a few days.

The first thing I want to say is that (in my experience) the Table and Render tools are not always an exact science! I've had to do quite a bit of persuading in the past to get them to do what I want. Perhaps a lack of skill on my part, but it feels like they just don't always do what it says on the tin!

Having said that, I believe the issue here is with fonts, and more specifically, the fact that they are not monospaced fonts (I had to look that word up). The best way I can explain this to myself is like this:

Think of a character as a little rectangular box with mostly white pixels and some black pixels that define the character. If those rectangular boxes are exactly the same size for all characters in font, it's called a monospaced font. This means that if you make up a word with any, say, 5 characters, it will be exactly the same height and width of any other word with 5 characters.

But if your font is not monospaced, this doesn't happen, i.e. the characters are not all the same size.

It took your workflow and looked at a version without the arrows vs one with the arrows - see below. Without the arrows, all rows are the same height

I'm still not quite sure how to solve this problem. Perhaps a combination of all arrows with font colour white (i.e. invisible) after each of your arrows will make all the rows the same size, or something quirky like that - as I said, sometimes it needs a lot of persuading