Archive for October 16th, 2009

Finding the width of a column in a table in OpenOffice.org writer is a bit of a black art, because the widths aren't stored anywhere, just the relative widths in arbitrary units. And if cells have been combined, then the object model has no concept of "columns" and there is no way to find the widths of cells. But, based on the table tutorial, I've written this function:

function colwidth (table, index) ' index is 0-based
	' need the table to be oriented (http://api.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=dev&msgNo=12552) 
	table.horiOrient = com.sun.star.text.HoriOrientation.LEFT_AND_WIDTH
	' tricks from http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/API/Samples/Java/Writer/TextTable
	dim n
	n = table.columns.count
	if index >= n then
		colwidth = 0
	elseif n = 1 then ' single column table
		colwidth = table.width
	else
		dim ratio as double
		ratio = table.width / table.tableColumnRelativeSum
		dim pos
		pos = table.tableColumnSeparators
		if index = 0 then
			colwidth = pos(0).position * ratio
		elseif index = n-1 then ' last column
			colwidth = (table.tableColumnRelativeSum - pos (ubound(pos)).position) * ratio
		else
			colwidth = (pos(index).position - pos(index-1).position) * ratio
		end if
	end if
end function