RE: Rich text for voter groups

["Ken Clark" <ken@dieboldes.com>]

Title:

This is now implemented, and will be in GEMS 1.10.2, to be released shortly.  Credit to Whitman for doing much of the leg work on this feature.

The Voter Group dialog now has a rich text editor just like race, candidate, and headers.  You enter the text for the party with whatever font you like.  In the case of Fresno, they will be entering multiple lines of party text for English and Spanish.  The "short" "long" and "none" ballot options for drawing endorsements based on the labels is now gone.  If you want short endorsement text, enter the short text as you want it in the rich text editor.

There is one unresolved issue with this new feature.  For left ovals, the voter group text is normally right justified.  Hence, you will see the party text right justified in the rich text editor.  The problem is that we use the same rich text to draw the party on the AccuVote-TS ballots.  On that system, the party is displayed below the candidate name, and is usually left justified.

There are a few possible solutions:

• Display the text on the TS right justified and like it.
• Use right ovals with running unified paper and touch screen.
• Add a "endorsement width" ballot option.  The voter group text would be drawn within that width in the candidate area.  The width would be to the right of the candidate for left ovals, and visa-versa for right.  That way, we can have left justified party text with left ovals.

The third option is the most flexible, but has a potential problem.  Right now we can get lucky with narrow races if a candidate has a long name but the party label is short.  By introducing a fixed endorsement width, the party text will all line up left justified within a column regardless of a particular candidate's width.  Before we implement this, I would like some feedback as to whether people think this is an issue, and solicit alternate solutions.

 

Ken

> > From: SKGLOBAL@aol.com [mailto:SKGLOBAL@aol.com]
> > Sent: Monday, February 15, 1999 11:47 AM
> >
> > In a message dated 2/13/99 11:34:24 AM Pacific Standard Time,
> ken@dieboldes.com
> > writes:
> >
> > << Alemeda county needs to be able to print the full text of a
> > party name >>
> >
> > Actually its Fresno.
> >