TITLE: How to Align Columns of Text PRODUCT: Ami Pro 2.0 DATE: 30-Oct-1991 PROBLEM: Columns of text do not align properly when printed. SOLUTION: Usually misaligned columns of text are caused by printing with a proportional font using spaces to align the text. Spaces are actually characters with a width value. Since proportional font characters have a different width for each character (thin letters are allocated less space than wide letters), the same number of spaces inserted to move text to a location on one line will not be the number of spaces needed to move text to that location on other lines. By contrast, fixed pitch fonts have the same width for each character and can be more accurately aligned with spaces (each space character moves all text to the right the same amount of space). There are two ways to accurately print columns of text in a proportional font. The first method is to establish a tab position for the beginning of each column. Press TAB before moving to the next column when typing text. A tab provides a way to move to a certain horizontal location without using a space character that is counted in the total character width of a line. The second method is to create a table with an appropriate number of columns for the text. Ami Pro tables provide a matrix of cells similar to a spreadsheet. The cells can automatically increase in size to accommodate word-wrapped paragraphs and multiple lines when automatic row size in table layout is selected. Columns of text in tables will align correctly.