Global all-form font change?

Most of my many P6 forms employ Helvetica Narrow. All occurrences of this font have been changed to HelveticaNeueDeskInterface-Regular by the Panorama conversion. Is it possible to find a way of changing them globally back to Helvetica Narrow?

David Duncan

For a particular form, you could open the blueprint, do a find and replace, then update the form from the revised blueprint. Press Command-F in the blueprint dialog to open the find/replace panel.

Or you could do this:

selectobjects objectinfo("font") match "HelveticaNeueDeskInterface-Regular"
changeobjects "font","Helvetica Narrow"

To do this for all forms in a database you would need to write a program that opened each form, ran the code above, then closed the form. This could be done in a simple loop.

By the way, Panorama 6 doesn’t store any font names, it just stores font numbers. When a database is converted from Panorama 6, it asks the system what the font name is for each number. I think maybe HelveticaNeueDeskInterface-Regular is what you get if the font isn’t installed. Could that be the case? Anyway, there is no change in Panorama that can fix this, it relies on the system to tell it what name is associated with the font number. The good news is that Panorama X stores fonts by name, so once you get the fonts set up, they will never change.

I had been wondering vaguely whether the blueprints could facilitate this. Now I can see it would be possible to globally change anything in blueprints with your example as a model.

That really is something! Thank you.

I think maybe HelveticaNeueDeskInterface-Regular is what you get if the font isn’t installed. Could that be the case?

Not so sure. Helvetica Narrow was actually replaced by HelveticaNeueDeskInterface-Regular in most forms and LucidaGrande in a few others.

I’ve just run that program you suggested and it worked like a charm. Took a few minutes to write the extra few lines of code and about one minute or so to run. How good is that!