I'm creating a view for printing labels. I've HTML'd / CSS'd a table with the right dimensions for 2 columns of 5 labels:

<div id="inventory_labels">
 <table class="table-bordered" id="avery8163">
 <thead>
 <tr>
 <td style='width: .155in;'></td>
 <td style='width: 4in;'></td>
 <td style='width: .19in;'></td>
 <td style='width: 4in;'></td>
 <td style='width: .155in;'></td>
 </tr>
 </thead>
 <tfoot>
 <tr>
 <td colspan="5"></td>
 </tr>
 </tfoot>
 <tbody>
 <% 40.times do # just a placeholder for the actual loop / partial %>
 <tr>
 <td></td>
 <td>LABEL #1 (should be a record)</td>
 <td></td>
 <td>LABEL #2 (should be a record)</td>
 <td></td>
 </tr>
 <% end %>
 </tbody>
 </table>
</div>

And the SCSS:

#inventory_labels 
 width: 8.5in;
 margin-right: auto;
 margin-left: auto;


table#avery8163 
 table-layout: fixed;
 width: 8.5in;

 thead, tfoot 
 td 
 height: .5in;
 
 

 tbody 
 td 
 height: 2in;
 
 


@media print 
 table#avery8163 
 thead 
 display: table-header-group;
 

 tfoot 
 display: table-footer-group;
 
 

I'd like to use a partial to loop over the records in the <tbody>, but I need to loop over 2 at a time, one for each "LABEL".

Any suggestions or ideas?

I did play with formatting this as divs (like this strategy from the dark ages) instead of table columns but the math got real messy since the page-margin and gutters don't line up well.

FIRST RUN

This is really ugly, right?

@counts is the ActiveRecord array of records I want to loop through, defined in the controller.

<tbody>
 <% n = 0 %>
 <% @loop.times do # @loop = (@counts.count/2).ceil %>
 <tr>
 <td></td>
 <td>
 <%= render partial: 'label', locals: count: @counts[n] %>
 <% n += 1 %>
 </td>
 <td></td>
 <td>
 <% if @counts[n].present? %>
 <%= render partial: 'label', locals: count: @counts[n] %>
 <% end %>
 <% n += 1 %>
 </td>
 <td></td>
 </tr>

 <% end %>
</tbody>

Seeing that it's not a problem to use your collection as an array, you can use in_groups_of method https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/Array.html#method-i-in_groups_of

<% @objects.in_groups_of(2, false) do |obj1, obj2| %>
 <tr>
 <td></td>
 <td><%= #something with obj1 %></td>
 <td></td>
 <td><%= #something with obj2, you should check if it's not nil though if the array has an odd length %></td>
 <td</td>
 </tr>
<% end %>