All I want to do is have an object representing a data field in black, on a white background. I can’t figure out how to do it. There’s a square to set the background color, but where is the UI to set the foreground color?
In a slightly more complicated realm, There does not seem to be a way to enter a capital S-comma (a Romanian character “Ș”). This seems to be an OS problem; it’s the same in BB-Edit, if you hold down shift S and then type 5 to indicate you want the S-comma, you get “S%”. I can copy a capital S-comma from a browser to a field, only this happens:
The field used to be Courier,
and it changed to a different font. I can’t tell what font it is. In graphics mode, the Text tab, the Font field shows blank. If I set it to Courier, nothing changes. Going to Data mode and back to Graphics mode, it still shows blank.
But really, I’d like someone to tell me how to set the text color in a text field. I don’t know what I did to make it not work. There are all these little windows, like the “Colors” window. It’s never clear what changes in the “Colors” window apply to; they don’t automatically update the fields in the “Appearance” pane, if that’s what they are supposed to apply to. Like if I am in the pencil tab of the colors window and choose a pencil, neither the color field nor the hexadecimal of the color field update. Changing the hexadecimal doesn’t change the color field in the appearance tab or anything in the Colors window.
The problems are just endless, and the help screens don’t help. Just typing the search string “color text” gives no results. Even asking duckduckgo or google (my usual way of navigating documentation) doesn’t take me to anywhere useful.
All I want is a field that shows text black on white. Why are simple things so hard?
Let’s just say that sort of works, sometimes. I set the font color to black, the background to white, and now when I am in data mode, and click on that field, the writing disappears.
I’d enclose a couple of screen shots, but this forum page won’t allow me to do it. All I get, is this text string:
OH, interesting. The screen shot files were being enclosed, but they weren’t being displayed in the popup in which I am editing the replies. All I saw were strings:
I’ll have to be aware of that, in the Web 1.0 future.
I think the original reference was to the iOS-style behaviour of pressing and holding a letter which, instead of auto-repeating, presents a menu of all the accented variants of that letter (not always all of them, in my experience) from which you can then select by tapping (on iOS) or by number. I quickly disabled that when it appeared on macOS and I can’t now remember how to enable it.
Yes, double-clicking the relevant glyph in ‘Show Emoji & Symbols’ is the simplest way to insert a character you use rarely. I used Keyman to create a keyboard layout which allows me to enter virtually any Unicode character I would ever need in any application, including all the accented roman letters included in Unicode, making extensive use of dead-key combinations. On my Windows keyboard at home the principal dead key is the otherwise useless ‘menu’, and on my MacBook it is ‘§’ (top left of a British Mac keyboard) for which I have similarly little use. Three successive keystrokes (S, comma, menu or S, comma, §) then results in Ş. Similarly s, v, menu to give š; A, o, menu to give Å; o, /, menu to give ø; o, e, menu to give œ; s, s, menu to give ß, etc.
Keyman layouts may be installed on both Mac and Windows, which is useful for me. I need to use a few Windows applications via Parallels on the Mac, and this ensures the same keyboard layout for both.
Another clue. The problem seems to be in the tab marked “T”, where there is a field called “Bkgnd”. If there is anything in that field, even FFFFFF, then the behavior is exhibited, that selecting that field in data mode causes the field to disappear. I suppose that’s because the de facto highlight color of black text, is white.
The Bkgnd field must be empty.
It would be nice if the foreground and background colors, and the foreground and background highlight colors, could be explicitly set.
Wouldn’t surprise me if they can be, Jim thinks of most everything, but it isn’t all brought to the attention of the user.
It works the same way as inputting common accents. After holding down the Shift-S, release the keys, then type one of the numbers displayed in the small popup.
The problem is that you are using the Pop up Editing option. Background colors don’t work with this option, and they never will. Go back to “regular” text editing and you can set any background color you like.
In this example I’ve set the background color of the form to gray, and the Bkgnd color of each of the Text Editor objects to FFFFFF. To prove that this works when editing, I’ve selected a couple of digits in the Latitude field. You can also set the text to any color you want, but I stuck with black since that’s what you said you wanted. But I did try setting it to other colors and that works as well.
The Pop up Editing option is a holdover from Panorama 1.0, over 35 years ago. It’s a completely non-standard UI for the Macintosh, and is only included for compatibility with old databases. You should not use it in any modern new database.
