Description

I was showing someone how to use Designer 7.0 today and came across a bug in the Font palette. I was trying to show them how to make the caption of a text field bold without making the value bold using the Bold (“B”) button on the Font palette however I could only change both the caption and value fonts together, not separately as one should be able to do using the selector control located at the top of the palette (which reads, “Currently editing Caption and Value…” by default).

Using the selector control, you should be able to set it to “Currently editing Caption properties…”, press the bold button and make only the caption font bold. Unfortunately, that’s not what happens. Instead, both fonts (or, the entire field) is changed to bold.

Rest assured, this bug was immediately fixed in Designer 7.1 — a highly-recommended upgrade because tables were introduced in that version, amongst other things.

Workaround

The good news is that there’s a simple workaround using script. All you need to do is use the Font palette to make sure that the Bold button isn’t activated (that the field isn’t bolded) and then set the following FormCalc script statements on field’s Initialize event using the Script Editor palette:

$.caption.font.typeface = "Myriad Pro"
$.caption.font.weight = "bold"
$.caption.font.size = "10pt"

Feel free to specify a different font name or point size if you like although I would recommend using the same font name and point size as you specified in the Font palette so that the result doesn’t differ too much from what you see on the canvas.

Finally, preview the form as PDF using the canvas’s PDF Preview tab. When the form is initialized (loaded) in Acrobat, the field’s caption font will be set to the type, weight and size you specified.

Fix

Please refer to the Bug List for updated information on the version(s) affected by this bug as well as if and when it was/will be fixed.

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Posted by Stefan Cameron on November 3rd, 2006
Filed under Bugs,Designer

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