Text Flow around other objects

[edeards]

Hi all,

Firstly - I'm new to Jasper, iText, iReport and PDF innards in general. However, I'm implementing a pretty complex document creation system and have numerous challenges ahead of me.

One thing I need to be able to do is have text "flow" around objects. Nothing tricky - square objects only. For example, the crummy ascii art below depicts text in a text box ( the ~), going around the subreport (depicted by the |||).

~~~~~~~~~|||||||||||||||||||||||||

~~~~~~~~~|||||||||||||||||||||||||

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I don't believe that JasperReports has this capability out of the box - am I correct in this belief? If I am correct - is anybody aware of anybody trying to implement this in the past? Alternatively, are there any suggested ways to tackle this problem? Is it likely to be difficult to implement an extension to the Jasper compiler to handle the idea of text flow?

The potential ways I see to do this would be:

• One text box with a subreport (or whatever) on top of it, somehow the text flow is achieved by detecting the overlap and being clever.
• Two text boxes, one on the left of the subreport, one below the subreport. Some custom attributes linking the two text boxes together, then somehow deal with the situation when the text hits the bottom of the first text box - rather than stretch the box, split the content string and put the second half into the second text box.

I've no idea the relative pain in implementing either of these. Any help/guidance/jeering appreciated.

Cheers,

Ed

[edeards]

Apologies - I've obviously posted this in the incorrect place. While I am using iReport for my templates, this is not really an iReport kind of question.