bdVector of the lengths of the character strings in the input.
nchar(x)
bdNumeric the same length as
x,
containing the number of characters in each of the
elements of
x.
x will be coerced to character, regardless of what it currently
contains.
Something will always happen, but in the case of non-atomic data, the result
may be somewhat surprising.
maxwid <- max(nchar(labels)) #max field needed