RE: Landscape Ballots

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

Title:

This is an oldie but a goodie (note the date).  Landscape is actually part of a larger project required for NY:  "full face ballots".

This is complete and will be in 1.15.1. 

The changes (modified slightly from the proposal):

• Ballot option to lay out the artwork landscape. 
• Race flag to extend the candidate horizontal lines to the edge of the candidate box.
• Race flag to draw vertical lines between candidate columns.
• Race flag to draw these horizontal and vertical candidate lines as a full grid within the race.  In other words, draw the lines even if there is not a candidate at the row and column of the race.
• New race layout options "by col"  and  "by row".  Currently GEMS always lays out candidates by column by row.  The option allows  laying them out by row by column.
• Candidate cols/row now controls the minimum number of columns or rows depending on whether the candidate grid is by column or by row.
• New race layout options "flow"  and "fixed".  The fixed option allows fixing a voter group to a given candidate row or column, insead of wrapping left to right or top to bottom.
• New candidate column value for vgroup.

The landscape feature is independent of the full face fixed candidate grid stuff.  You can lay out a classic GEMS ballot in landscape, and a full face ballot in portrait.  You can even mix the two, although you will need to do that manually.

To lay out a race with fixed columns by voter group, set the "Row/Col" field in the voter group editor to the correct column.  0 is the left column or top row of the race.  There is no restriction on columns being unique, but you can get overlapped candidates in your artwork if they are not carefull.  If you don't want a voter group to have its own column because there are no candidates of that vgroup in any full face race, set the column for that vgroup to the same value as one that is used or to a really high number.  This is typical in both Puerto Rico and New York looking at the samples I have.  Use the min column/row value to guarantee you get the candidate columns you want even if the last voter group has no candidates in a given race.

The LHS/NY ballots are layed out from left to right rather than top to bottom.  The GEMS automatic layout engine still operates from top to bottom however.  They will need to place the races manually to get the effect they desire, but it is possible.

Rotation behaves the same as with previous releases.  I don't know if candidate rotation is used in any of the accounts that will use the fixed candidate stuff, but I imagine they will want to rotate "within vgroup" if they do.

Needless to say, the changes were extensive.  The paint is still wet, and I expect people will want some tweaks in functionality as well as the obligatory bug fixes.  We'll treat the early 1.15 series as "prereleases" for LHS testing so California does not have to suffer.  Once 1.15 looks at least as solid as 1.14 though, we'll end the 1.14 branch.  1.14 and earlier Databases will upgrade to 1.15 without harm as usual.  People testing 1.14 are encouraged to try out 1.15 to avoid any surprises when they are forced to upgrade.

Ken