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RE: Landscape Ballots



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):

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