The client just called and gave me a list of spacing changes he wants for a custom report. I've always just spaced things by eye and ran the report to make sure everything fit. But he's getting really specific. He wants certain fields to be exactly X many characters wide with 2 characters between them.

I didn't want to get into the whole issue of proportional vs monospaced fonts and font sizes, so I'm going to take a chance and assume he means a character to be an average letter in the 10 point regular Arial that the fields are in.

Given that, is there an easier way of sizing things than trial and error? Unlike some report writers, I see no where in the VFP report designer that says make this X characters wide. I tried turning the grid on, but I don't see any way to set it to be a "character" wide.

I was thinking I could temporarily change the field name to all of the same letter, but that's a pain. What would you guys do in this situation?

Thanks,

Michelle