Typically, when rendering cells, the content and formatting associated with each cell is rendered individually. In some cases, this results in visual artifacts, such as seams, at the borders of contiguous cells that have common formatting.
Various embodiments of the invention are disclosed in the following detailed description and the accompanying drawings.
The invention can be implemented in numerous ways, including as a process; an apparatus; a system; a composition of matter; a computer program product embodied on a computer readable storage medium; and/or a processor, such as a processor configured to execute instructions stored on and/or provided by a memory coupled to the processor. In this specification, these implementations, or any other form that the invention may take, may be referred to as techniques. In general, the order of the steps of disclosed processes may be altered within the scope of the invention. Unless stated otherwise, a component such as a processor or a memory described as being configured to perform a task may be implemented as a general component that is temporarily configured to perform the task at a given time or a specific component that is manufactured to perform the task. As used herein, the term ‘processor’ refers to one or more devices, circuits, and/or processing cores configured to process data, such as computer program instructions.
A detailed description of one or more embodiments of the invention is provided below along with accompanying figures that illustrate the principles of the invention. The invention is described in connection with such embodiments, but the invention is not limited to any embodiment. The scope of the invention is limited only by the claims and the invention encompasses numerous alternatives, modifications and equivalents. Numerous specific details are set forth in the following description in order to provide a thorough understanding of the invention. These details are provided for the purpose of example and the invention may be practiced according to the claims without some or all of these specific details. For the purpose of clarity, technical material that is known in the technical fields related to the invention has not been described in detail so that the invention is not unnecessarily obscured.
Rendering common cell formatting for adjacent cells is disclosed. In some embodiments, the term “cell” refers to a cell of a table in an application, such as a word processing application, presentation application, spreadsheet application, desktop publishing application, web site design application, etc. In some embodiments, the term “cell” refers to a cell associated with at least standard spreadsheet functionality. The term “at least standard spreadsheet functionality” in the context of a cell includes the ability to define the content of one cell in such a way that the content of the one cell is determined based at least in part on the content of one or more other cells, and the content of the one cell is updated automatically without further human action if the content of one or more of the one or more other cells is changed. In some embodiments of spreadsheet applications, cells are organized into one or more individual tables or table objects, each of which includes a desired number of rows and columns of cells. In such cases, a sheet of a spreadsheet document may include a desired number of table objects as well as other objects such as charts, graphs, images, etc. In other embodiments of spreadsheet applications, cells may be organized into other configurations, such as the (seemingly) infinite single grid or table of cells in each sheet of some typical spreadsheet applications that includes an unlimited (or very large) number of rows and columns of cells.
Rendering common cell formatting associated with a set of adjacent cells as a single entity is disclosed herein. The term “set of adjacent cells” as used herein refers to a set of cells in which each cell in the set shares at least one edge and/or corner with another cell in the set. Rendering common cell formatting as a single entity instead of individually for each cell results in the visual fidelity of the common cell formatting to be preserved, e.g., when printing, by preventing seams or other visible artifacts along borders or edges of adjacent cells from appearing. The described techniques may be employed when rendering any type of common cell formatting for a set of adjacent cells, such as cell border formatting (including, e.g., line color, transparency, pattern, weight, etc.), cell background formatting (including, e.g., cell fill color, transparency, pattern, pattern color, etc.), etc.
In some embodiments, one or more sets of adjacent cells that each have at least one type of formatting in common are identified, e.g., prior to rendering or printing. In some embodiments, a dictionary or other data structure keyed by cell formatting type is created for sets of cells. In some such cases, a cell formatting type for a particular set of adjacent cells is united into a single Bezier path so that it can be rendered as a single entity. For example, a Bezier path may be employed to define a shape that represents and/or circumscribes the union of the individual cells in the set of cells and to which the common formatting can be applied once.
Although the foregoing embodiments have been described in some detail for purposes of clarity of understanding, the invention is not limited to the details provided. There are many alternative ways of implementing the invention. The disclosed embodiments are illustrative and not restrictive.