A multi-page invoice table
Twelve lines is one page and thirty is two — and the second has to look exactly like the first, or the invoice comes back from the customer's accounts department.
A figure that says which headings reach it
A figure on its own says nothing. Take 118 400 out of a table and it is a number and nothing else: what makes it mean something is the branch on its line and the quarter at the top of its column. The eye finds both without being asked — it runs up the column and along the row. Software reading the page aloud to somebody who cannot see it has no eye to run along a row, so unless the file says which heading goes with which figure, a sheet of thirty branches is read out as a hundred and twenty bare numbers.
The sheet below says it. It states that its first two rows are headings and that its first column is one too, and from that the library works out, figure by figure, which headings reach it — including the two that no straight line finds: the year, which stands over four quarters at once, and the word beside the column of branches, which covers both heading rows. This is what an accessibility audit asks of a table, and it is what nobody wants to write out by hand for a hundred and twenty amounts. The sheet runs onto a second page and is still one table there: the heading printed again at the top of page two is the same heading, not a second one.
What this example shows
- Every amount naming its branch, its quarter and its year.
- Two headings no straight line reaches: a year over four columns, a heading over two rows.
- One table over two pages, its heading drawn again on the second.
The code that writes it, in full
Whole programs, hundreds of lines long, for whoever writes your software.
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The document itself
What this document weighs
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Details for technical readers
Exactly 87 579 bytes.
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Examples near this one
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A self-paginating table
A long table handed over whole, deciding for itself where the pages break: its heading on top of every page, its footnote under every page, its grey grounds stated once for the whole table, and a note you draw under each page at the exact place the table reports.
Cells merged down the rows
A specification sheet whose cells are merged down the rows: each group named once beside all of its rows, with one note beside them; the thin lines stop at those cells' edges, and a note too long for the rows it covers makes them grow.
Columns measured from their cells
One parts list twice: four columns sharing the width equally, then the reference, the quantity and the price each as wide as their own widest cell and the description given everything they leave.
Glossary
- PDF library
- A piece of software your own programs use to write PDF documents. It has no window and no buttons: your program tells it what to draw, and it hands the finished file back. This site also calls it the engine, which is the same thing under another name. The server is a second program that holds the engine and answers whoever asks it for a document over the network, and the rendering service is that server running on our machines rather than on yours.