The style (i.e. bold, italic and/or underline) color (and, after version 4.3 the font) of a Caption, Footing or Heading can be set to enhance the usability of the XpressDox interview screen. This is done by typing certain codes into the Caption, Footing and Heading commands, but the easiest way to set the style and color is by using the Command Editor (or, prior to Version 3 of XpressDox, the Template Author’s Toolkit), which has wizards which guide you in the selection of the options and which put the correct codes into the Caption, Footing and Heading commands.
To change the style and/or color and font in an existing template, the codes can be typed into the command without having to use the wizards.
Examples are as follows:
1. A caption is to be bold and italic and underlined, colored light blue and rendered with font MS Reference Sans Serif with size 8.2 points:
«Caption(Name,^biu^@LightBlue/MS Reference Sans Serif/8.2@The Party's Name)»
The choice of color can be made from the list presented in the Command Editor wizard – there is an extensive number of colors available, and the common colors have their common English names, e.g. Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, etc.
2. Indent a Heading and color and style it:
«Heading(CompanyName,######^i^@Navy@The company details are entered here, but if you don't know a particular item, then leave it blank.)»
The # characters cause the heading text to be indented – which means that if a long heading wraps onto more than one line then the second and subsequent lines will start directly under the first line. If spaces are used instead of the # characters, then only the first line of a long heading will be indented. Each # character will cause the heading to indented about half a character width.
3. Aligning the Heading:
«Heading(CompanyName,|^bui^@Navy@The company details are entered here, but if you don't know a particular item, then leave it blank.)»
The “pipe” character | will cause the Heading text to be aligned with the left hand edge of the data capture control on the interview screen.
The “backslash” character \ will align the text in the centre (center) of the data capture control in the interview screen.
«Heading(CompanyName,\^bui^@Navy@The company details are entered here, but if you don't know a particular item, then leave it blank.)»
Note that the indent (#), style (^bui^) and color/font (@Red@) codes are optional, but if they are included, they must appear at the front of the command text, and in the order shown in these examples.
The discussion above that applies to the Heading command applies to the Footing command as well.
Other articles on using Caption Footing and Heading commands are found at Data capture dialog layout tips and Laying out the data capture dialog, and articles that they in turn link to.
