table sort order - SOLVED (functional workaround)

[rebecca officer]

Hi Steve

Thanks for the suggestion. Someone else sent me another workaround off-list, which I thought I'd post here to get it into the archive: put an M space in front of each number. This seems illogical but it works.

For me, I'm sorting in a "database" document and copying some of the sorted rows to another document for production, so the extra space at the start doesn't matter. The sole purpose of that column is for sorting - it never ends up in output. If I had to display the contents of that column, your conditional text idea would be a good one.

Cheers, Rebecca

>>> Steve Rickaby <srickaby at wordmongers.demon.co.uk> 06/22/06 9:47 PM >>>
At 14:00 +1200 22/6/06, rebecca officer wrote:

>I'm sorting a table and want to end up with the following order:
>5
>5E
>6
>
>Instead, it gives me:
>5
>6
>5E
>
>Can I change that? If not, I'd appreciate other ideas for achieving what I'm after. The numbers are compulsory, but the letter E is arbitrary. I tried making it a comma instead but the sorting just seemed to ignore that.

I don't know if you can change the sort order in FrameMaker's guts, but if you have the option of using it, here's a hack that gets the sort to partially work: make the letters conditional, and sort entire table with them turned off. This groups all the numerics together - i.e. the major sort works - but you then have to re-display the conditional letters and do the minor sort(s) separately.
-- 
Steve

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