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NotableDifferences

Henning von Bargen edited this page Mar 8, 2022 · 3 revisions

Notable differences in comparison to the official BIRT version

Bugs fixed which are not yet fixed in the official repository

Bug 519375 Birt inserts an extra space in DOCX if part of the word is highlighted using an HTML tag
2022-03-08 Added a PR 851 for this now.

Bug 565629 DOCX Emitter tables are shift left with Word 2016 or newer.
Fixed, since the DOCX emitter now outputs Word 2016 documents by default.

Bug 562873 PDF Rendering error with dynamic text item after page break.
Fixed with PR #630

Bug 433725 Enhancement for WordEmitter: Support pageBreakInside: avoid for table rows

Bug 432310 WordEmitter enhancement for page header: hide on first page

Bug 431616 Word Emitter creates superfluous nested tables

Behavior changes

The fix for bug 431616 has important consequences:

Where standard BIRT creates a 1x1 Word table for each BIRT dynamic text item, with the optimization in place, this table is omitted if the dynamic text item is a direct child of a table cell or grid cell.

However, standard BIRT uses this 1x1 Word table to support border, margin, padding for the dynamic text item.

Thus, border, margin, padding etc defined for a dynamic text item will be ignored if the item is directly inside a grid/table cell.

However, the same is true for Data items anyway.

And in case of padding, there is a work-around: Instead of specifying margin or padding for the dynamic text item, one can specify padding for the sorrounding table cell.

In conclusion, I think that the patch is generally useful for the case of a single Dynamic Text item withing a cell.

If the cell contains two or more Dynamic Text items, this can be a problem, however: Quite often, these items habe something like margin-top:6pt or padding-top:6pt or whatever defined, intended to generate a little space between them.

With the modified emitter all these paddings are ignored, such that the texts come directly below each other without space inbetween.

Additional features

Bug fixes and features of the SpudSoft Excel Emitter (XLSX emitter only)

This fork contains the last version of Jim Talbut's "SpudSoft Excel Emitter". This version contains some enhancements and bug fixes which are still not included in the official BIRT repo.

Kind of a "vertical tab stop" (PDF emitter only)

Sometimes, a summary or something like that should be at the bottom of the page instead of directly below a table, e.g. starting at exactly 170mm from the page's top. Note that I don't mean a page footer!

This is not possible with standard BIRT. However, with the help of a "User Property", it is possible to achieve this with this fork. A sample report demonstrating this will be added later.

Word field functions (DOCX and WPML emitter only)

Using a label and a "User Property", it is possible to create Word fields with functions like e.g. Number of Pages. A sample report demonstrating this will be added later.

Preventing List items to generate Word tables (DOCX and WPML emitter only)

Normally, a BIRT list item will create a Word table with one column. However, nested tables are problematic when editing Word files later. Using a "User Property", it is possible to avoid the creation of the Word table, resulting in a cleaner and more natural Word document. A sample report demonstrating this will be added later.