Printing an Eviews table

[TimGrun]

Hi,

I am developing an easy to use tabling system in Eviews for our Economists and so far have found Eviews to be a good programming language. With Eviews there is very good control for the various table layouts that our Economists might create from our table templating system.
One problem I have not been able to solve is that Eviews wants to put an 1 inch border around any printed table. Most other programs allow you to change the top, bottom, left and right margins down to 0 inches. I have found some margin options within spools, but they don't seem to give me complete control of the margins.

Any help would be greatly appreciated,
Tim

p.s. Any chance an option will be added to @wsplit to split on a specific character (non-blank)? e.g. @wsplit(%line, "=")

[EViews Gareth]

I'll let Jason answer the table question, but with regards to the @wsplit bit, could you clarify what you mean. @wsplit turns a space delimited string into an svector. What would the extra character do?

[EViews Gareth]

Actually, I guess you could mean you want to define your own delimiter, rather than a space.

We'll consider it - it seems easy enough for @wsplit, but then we should probably add a similar thing to all of the other @w functions, and some of those might be more problematic.

Of course you can always do it manually using the @instr command, along with the @mid and @left commands to manually split the string into two parts, and then create svectors from them.

[TimGrun]

Thanks Gareth for repling.

Yes, I would like to define my own delimiter. I have "name=value" pairs on a line that I would like to split each on the "=".
I just did a split on %line, looping over each result doing a @replace(token, "="," ") and then spliting again.
@wsplit(%line, "=") would be easier. :)

Tim
p.s. svector's are great!

Actually, I guess you could mean you want to define your own delimiter, rather than a space.

We'll consider it - it seems easy enough for @wsplit, but then we should probably add a similar thing to all of the other @w functions, and some of those might be more problematic.

Of course you can always do it manually using the @instr command, along with the @mid and @left commands to manually split the string into two parts, and then create svectors from them.

[EViews Jason]

You unfortunately cannot change the margins of a table. You will not get an exact replica but you could save the table to a rtf file and then print the file via a program that has greater printer customization such as MS Word.

[TimGrun]

That's too bad. Is it a technical issue with Eviews or might there be an option in the near future to modify the margins?

I would like to point out another problem with Eviews printing. This problem, I believe, is much more important than the margins problem.
My job is to automate procedures for the economists here as much as possible. Economists enter information on different web pages which then execute Eviews. Eviews might run some simulations and then produce some tables and graphs all stored in a spool file. I would like to save the whole spool as a pdf into a specified file. Unfortunately, the only way to save the whole spool is to MANUALLY print to an Adobe PDF printer driver.
Why can't the whole spool be saved as either a postscript or a pdf file using something like spool.save(type=pdf)? There are free tools out there such as OpenOffice which might help (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5864 ... rtf-to-pdf).
Right now I will have to save each object separately and then find converters to help automate the building up of a pdf file of all the objects. Not much fun. :(

Eviews 7 string enhancements make automating tasks much easier. So now the input and execution of eviews tasks can be automated easily. So saving the output within a program in the most widely used output format (pdf) would be nice.

Thanks for your help,
Tim

You unfortunately cannot change the margins of a table. You will not get an exact replica but you could save the table to a rtf file and then print the file via a program that has greater printer customization such as MS Word.

[EViews Jason]

Tim thanks for your suggestions. Adding PDF and margin support will be investigated and will most likely not be added til version 8.

[TimGrun]

Thanks for replying Jason.

So, the obvious question is when can we expect eviews 8 to be ready. :D

In the meantime, please note my bug report on saving a table in rtf format.

Thanks,
Tim

Tim thanks for your suggestions. Adding PDF and margin support will be investigated and will most likely not be added til version 8.

[fbrayton]

I like to second the request for better automation of PDF printing -- ie, the ability within a program to fully control the "printing" of PDF output.
This would be a very useful improvement.