This was easy in Pan 6, but it’s giving me fits in Pan X. When we print an invoice to give to the shipping department, there can be a list of instructions on what to include in the shipment, etc. In Pan 6 I use 2 text objects, one is a list of checkbox characters, separated by ¶, so that it displays as a vertical column of checkboxes. Alongside that, the other text box has a similarly constructed ¶ separated array of instructions items. Code establishes how many checkboxes to display according to how many instruction items there are. This makes a nice list of instruction items with accompanying checkboxes for the shipper to complete.
My checkbox array in Pan 6 consists of the letter “q” as many times as needed, in the Wingdings font. This doesn’t work at all in Pan X, no doubt because X uses Unicode characters. I’ve been all over the Font Awesome documentation but it doesn’t give me much clue how to construct a Text Display that will show a variable number of “empty box” characters.
No, it has to be an empty check box, so the shipper can check it off himself. Finding a character that looks right isn’t the issue, it’s how to manipulate it in my form as a variable number of boxes. What font is the character you used?
I don’t know is this will be of any help to you, but if your Text Display is set to FontAwesome you can generate the blank check box using chr(61590) and the checked box using chr(61510).
I found this web page that talks about converting from Wingdings to Unicode.
Based on this, I found that
chr(10065)
produces the character you are looking for. You don’t need to choose the Wingdings font, this will work with the regular system font. So your formula will look like this:
You could use ¶ instead of cr() if you like. Also, you could simply use something like this:
rep(chr(10065)+cr(),3)[1,-2]
Just replace 3 with the actual number of boxes you need, or use a variable. The text funnel on the end strips off the last carriage return, you may or may not need to do that. You could also use the strip() function to do that.
Using this same technique you could also use a Font Awesome character, though you would have to make sure to choose the Font Awesome font.
It’s tremendous help. The documentation shows this in a much more complicated form and I wasn’t able to make it work. I can accomplish what I’m after with chr(61590)+¶+chr(61590)+¶+… as many times as I need it, doing changeobject to set it for individual cases.
Just read Jim’s post, and being able to use a variable in an otherwise static formula is best of all. I do not understand how you can get a Wingdings character to show up without specifying it as the font, but I will probably find out by reading the link.
I think this character is now part of the Unicode standard, so you would not actually be using Wingdings at all. Personally, I think the Font Awesome character Gary found is nicer looking, but in any case, you’ve got choices and the solution is still easy, just as it was in Panorama 6.
