This is and old layout issue, which seems to have not made it into the improvements section.
When using the unit column in non-inventory SQ/SO/SI/PQ/PO/PI etc the column display are needing improvement:
In edit mode, is poorly proportioned, would be better to have a wider entry box for description and narrower for units/qty/unit price
Ver 21.7.17
Edit: I don’t use inventory, because I don’t run stock inventory, but I do recall a few years back someone mentioned on this topic that this problem doesn’t affect the unit column when using inventory, but only for non-inventory
There is no unit column for non-inventory items. You have added a line-item custom field with that name to your sales quote form. When you do that, the program adjusts column widths to make room for content you might decide to enter in the custom field. Since the program cannot predict what you might enter, it cannot allocate column space in advance.
As for differences between screen and PDF presentations, the program is not what-you-see-is-what-you-get. The screen presentation is your operating system’s rendering of HTML. The PDF is created by a separate engine.
As I already wrote, the program does not know in advance what number you will enter there. You might enter 123,456,234.28 and need lots of space. Line item custom fields are inserting unknown content into an array variable.
For the differences between the Screen View which is proper layout, and PDF which is not proper layout and what the user will present to their customer, it it reasonable to just say " the program is not what-you-see-is-what-you-get " ?
Would this make it qualify for “Improvements”?
The size option is only concerned with the field sizes in edit forms since the final layout will change dynamically based on the actual content and the number of visible columns.
Manager built in pdf has two types of columns:
No-wrap column which have a minimum size that will expand depending on content. These column are Qty, Units, Tax Code & Amount.
All other columns are distributed equally based on their colspan.
You can change that using a custom theme where you can set a specific custom column to nowrap and assign a minimum fixed width.
It is proper, but you will have to either set up your inventory/non-inventory items properly and use them instead of relying on redundant custom fields. Alternatively, you can build a custom theme to resize your custom fields.
If you’re talking about the document display width, then yes and it shouldn’t be. The reason is the view mode tries to maximize the use of your monitor or browser window real estate, which makes displaying things on screen much easier.
The print mode is your local printer drivers’ best adaptation to fit what you see on the screen onto physical paper sizes.
The built-in PDF printer solves other issues for the pagination as well as headers and footers. This way the users can create easy custom fields without having to go through the nightmare of aligning things using css convoluted ways. This has the downside of not being able to set column widths the normal way, but it’s a good tradeoff.
Now that you know the reason behind the differences, I hope you’d appreciate the optimizations made and see why they are necessary. Also, this will help you better understand how to optimize them for your own purposes.
