Inline styles in ODS PRINTER output
Posted by Paul at 10:33 pm
Controlling formatting of ODS PRINTER (PDF/RTF) outputs has always seemed like a bit of a black art to me, but there are usually ways of getting around potential issues if you know where to look. With SAS V9.2, there are some new and probably unknown features, including the use of ‘inline styles’.
For a good introduction to this I recommend having a look at this SAS document “How to Add a Little Spice to Your PDF Output“.
As a quick example, you need to specify an escape character eg. “^” or “¬”.
ods escapechar="^" ;
Then, you can use that escape character “^” in a number of elements such as a title or PROC REPORT ‘LINE’ statement:
title1 "Colour ^{style [color=red] red} and ^{style [color=blue] blue}";
There are a couple of useful new functions NBSPACE and NEWLINE.
Example:
title1 "First line^{newline 2}and this line after 2 blank lines";
Other useful ODS PRINTER/ODS PDF documents:
- Creating RTF-Output Using ODS and PROC TEMPLATE (Marcel Hoevenaars and Machteld Baljet, Blue Gum Data Analysis, Blackheath, NSW)
- SAS(R) 9.2 Output Delivery System: User’s Guide, TEMPLATE Procedure: Creating a Style Template (Definition) (SAS Institute Inc)
- ODS for PRINT, REPORT and TABULATE (Lauren Haworth, Genentech, Inc., San Francisco)