No, its not already
there. Your proposal, though, introduces a fixed quarter-inch unit width
to races. GEMS doesn't fix the size of its drawing elements
-- elements flow like paragraphs in a document.
What you are looking
for is the ability to customize the columns. Instead of just specifying
how many columns a ballot has, you would specify the start and extent of each
column. The internal data structure for this has actually been in
place to do this since GEMS 0.1, but has never been used. I even think
this is a VTS feature. It has been on the TODO list for too long to
remember.
The problem is that
a decent user interface would involve a cool looking ruler with stipples
that you could drag around to adjust the columns. That would be a custom
control involving a lot of work. It has never been deemed worth it.
Put in your words, 99% of Canadian elections have three race or less ballots,
which means they should take less than half an hour to lay out by hand.
There is also no statutory reason not to lay out these three race ballots one
race atop another, or beside without the quarter inch gap. In short, I
doubt those accounts could justify the cost of development of the feature.
Larger accounts that could justify it have bigger problems than
tweaking individual columns by a quarter inch. I would certainly enjoy
finding an account willing to fund this though. I have wanted this feature
since I designed the column structures.
As a final note, you
can approximate the effect you are looking for by using the "box margins" ballot
option. That means however you have to eat another quarter inch channel,
and get 10, 10, 9 channel columns. The box margin feature however
appears broken now that I try it, since 1.15.1 I suspect. I'll look into
that if you want. As you can see, this stuff just isn't
used.
Ken
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