Question

How to configure text objects to fill out the space of a previous object that is empty?

Applicable to 

BarTender Designer 2019 and later

Answer / Solution

Before, when working with different text objects, a solution for this problem would require Visual Basic. However, thanks to the new tools implemented in v2019 of the software, depending on the configuration of the document, it might be quite easy and straight forward to implement.

The easiest way to set up the document is probably by using a Grid object to place the text objects.

So if your data looks like this:

fielddata01

fielddata04

fielddata05

You can set up a 1x5 Grid

And insert the different text objects (might be better if they are 'wrapped' text objects, so that they can easily adapt to the size of the grid), like this:

If you do a preview (without modifying any settings), it will look like this:

And when all records are available, it will look like this:

The reason, for the different spacing between records with the default settings is due to the height of the table object, as by default it will try to fill out all the space allotted for the table object. Since there are less records available, to fill out the space, they have bigger gaps in between them.

This can be adjusted in the Grid options, so that the Height of the grid is calculated automatically, keeping in mind that the 'minimum height' should be shorter than the actual size of the table (so that the elements can be 'compressed' as much as possible or required), for example:

Now when we do a preview it looks like this:

Additional resources

Please see Object Layouts (help file) for more information