4 replies to this topic

[mattbrand]

Hey everyone,

My company is in the process of creating some screens that are GUI-only basically for the first time using VIP's functionality. In doing this, I've come to an issue that we have had in the past, and never resolved.

We have always used "terminal" fonts for all our screen fonts...display field, current field, formats, etc. We did this because we had screens in both greenscreen and GUI, and the terminal font lines up exactly where the greenscreen font lines up, obviously. But now that we are doing some GUI-only screens I want to start using nicer looking fonts, especially in the smooth paging sections of the screens.

However, when I start changing the fonts around and using proportional fonts, things get really wonky on our screens. I have a couple issues I am wrestling with:

1. It is very difficult to line up screen field tags the way we used to using terminal fonts.

2. A lot of the fonts look way too small, and when you enlarge the fonts using the A icon in the toolbar, the fonts look better, but the screen display gets way too wide. It would be fine on a 1064 x 768 or higher display, but our customers will most likely be in smaller display modes.

3. I have had major headaches using Forms Designer...crashes and even having a function not work after leaving Forms Designer. We are converting very complex legacy functions, so I think the save process from Forms Designer is having problems dealing with them.

Anyone been through any of this? And if so, do you have suggestions about what fonts to use to make the transition easier, and/or any tips on making our screens look more modern?

Thanks,

Matt

[mattbrand]

No one is touching this post with a ten foot pole, eh?

OK well, how about I break it down a bit.

Do people use Forms Designer for screen layouts? And do people use terminal fonts, or did they ever when they first transitioned to GUI?

[Lewis Mccabe]

Matt,

Screen Size:
It is very easy these days to get the customers to go for the larger screens. Screens have come down in price considerably and the customer, when shown, can see the advantages.

Screen Layout Problem:
If you make statics text boxes and use a good font (We use Arial) you should be able to achieve what you want. Before you do much work, you need to decide on the GUI look you want to achieve and settle on it application wide. I remember Neil Mellis stressing this strongly in a meeting a few years ago. He advocated hiring a graphic artist to help in the design.

Forms Designer Crashing:
We have not seen any of that lately. If crashing is pervasive, I would try to find a common denominator and write a tool to correct your native before import to VIP. We imported an entire application into VIP without too many problems. The ones we did encounter were handled on a case by case basis.

Hth, Lew

[DARREN]

When defining your screen prompts, as Lew stated, decide on a standard an stick to it i.e. left or right justified...and then set the justification on the prompts. Secondly...and this is one some people forget...set the Text Box property on the prompts, especially if you are using proportional fonts. That way you won't have large gaps between your prompts and data fields and/or your data fields won't truncate your prompts.

[mattbrand]

Thanks for the advice Lew. That will be useful to us when we are moving our whole accounting application to GUI. However, at this point, I am only developing a small interface for an portion of employees (salespeople) for an existing customer. It is a great starting point for us, because it gets me familiar with the workings of some of the GUI objects, while not being overwhelming in scope.

Darren - the text box property is exactly what I was looking for. I always had trouble aligning the fonts for headings, and that takes care of it. Thanks so much!

Matt