Hi:
Because ODS PDF uses a proportional spaced font, you will have issues "lining up" text strings when you try to control the whole report. For example, compare the 2 sets of lines below:
** Proportional Font:
wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww (20 letter 'w')
iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii (20 letter 'i')
** Compared to fixed pitch font:
[pre]
wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww (20 letter 'w')
iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii (20 letter 'i')
[/pre]
Note how only in the "fixed pitch" font, does anything line up. In a fixed pitch font, the letter 'i' takes up the same amount of horizontal space as the letter 'w'. On the other hand, in a proportional font (the first example), the letter 'i' takes up
less horizonal space on the line compared to the letter 'w'. Therefore, when you try to write a report the way you describe, you will see "wavy-ness" or the space between 2 values changing.
PROC PRINT, PROC REPORT and other SAS procedures use a TABLE layout with proportional fonts to keep columns lined up when ODS PDF (or ODS HTML or ODS RTF) is used to create reports. I still don't understand your report requirements well enough to understand what you are trying to do. And, since you have only shown 1 observation's worth of output, I have no clear picture on how the report should look if you have multiple providers.
Also, you do not need to put ...... as spacers to show your output. There is a way to display "preformatted" output, such as you want to show. In order to preserve code and output indention, refer to this previous forum posting.
http://support.sas.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=27609毙
It talks about how to surround code snippets with [pre] and [/pre] in order to show "lined up" output without resorting to ...... to control spacing.
Seeing the code that you are currently using and a small subset of the data would be useful. If you feel that you cannot post your data, then using some fake data is perfectly acceptable -- but do show more than 1 observation, so we have a sense of how the data looks (more than 1 obs for each ID, for example) and how the final report output needs to be transformed from the input data.
cynthia