Portal Cosmetics - borders, lines, effects

[Wickerman]

One thing that drives me nuts an burns hours of my time is my bafflement with the behavior of lines and edges and alignments when placing fields in portals.

For instance, if I have three text boxes in a row, I can play with borders and spacing between them to get various "looks" when displayed -- but if I put a little non-field graphic at the end of the row (for instance a Delete button in the form of an icon) the lower edge never wants to line up neatly with the field boxes -- I fiddle with embossing, various border colors (grey, black, none), slight re-sizing . . . and eventually stumble into a solution by doing something kludgey like adding an extra little line with the Line tool along the bottom edge. Once I get it to look okay, I'm never sure *why* it looks okay, so I end up doing it all over again in a later solution.

Is this just me? ANy resources out there that address simply how to make clean-loking portals?

Also, a specific Q: If I want to use the @@ symbol to include numbering on the portal rows, it seems as though I'm limited in how small I can make the box by the character size in Layout mode. For instance, entering '@@' in Arial 10 pt., I can't make it narrower than 27 pixels -- if I try, it shunts the second '@' onto a second line, which crosses the portal line.

Thanks!

[Wickerman]

Also, there seems to be different behavior on the different rows of the portal. I'm attaching an example of the sort of thing I'm talking about -- the first row looks okay, but the others have all sorts of odd gaps/lines. If I tinker with the arrangment, those problems get solved but others crop up.

[bruceR]

Make it flat; "none" for effects. Size the portal to 1 row tall. Size the fields to the same height as the portal. Now set portal row count as preferred.

[Wickerman]

Thanks for the suggestion. . . . am playing with this.

So, do you use borders on the fields, on the portal, on both or neither? I'm trying with no borders on the portal, and fill borders on the fields -- it looks good except there's no border on the bottom edge.

Actually, now that I try, I'm finding the border options are greyed out (not available) for the portal object? Is that always the case?

So how do I get a border on the southern edge?

[Wickerman]

Oh -- I think I have it now -- I didn't have the scrollbar displayed. Seems to be behaving well now.

Thanks very much!