Two problems moving from FM 11 to 13

[jjjjp]

I have encountered two issues changing to FM 13 from 11:

1. Vertically centred text and buttons don't align properly with vertically centred data fields of the same height and font. They signed properly in FM 11.
2. The choices of grey fill or text from FM 11 do not match up with the choices offered in FM 13. This creates many challenges in modifying old layouts and adding new ones.

Suggestions about how best to resolve these two issues?

Thanks.

[Wim Decorte]

Not really...

The layout rendering "engine" in FM12/13/14 is just a totally different beast with the introduction of themes.   The best suggestion is to pick an existing theme or create your own and apply it consistently.  Any formatting changes you make that are not saved back into a theme will create what is called a "local CSS override" and it will bloat your file and make it slower.

[jjjjp]

Thanks, Wim.

I figured this would be the solution to 2. Well, a lot of work ahead, but I knew I would have to do this at some point soon and can certainly see the long-term payoff in all sorts of ways.

Your solution should take care of 1, too, once I figure out how perfectly to align the two types of objects even in a single instance (text of various kinds on the one hand and field on the other). But I don't know what is causing the alignment to go off in the first place. Shouldn't the text for the two objects align if the font, the cell height are the same in both cases and both are set to align vertically? Yet the text and buttons look lower than the data fields.

 

[jjjjp]

One more thing. Does conditional formatting get bundled into each style? It seems not. Would I therefore have to adjust each conditionally formatted element. This will takes hours and hours, if not days and days? They're in multiple places on all of my layouts, of which I have many.

[Wim Decorte]

Not sure what you mean.  Conditional formatting is not part of the style, it's something that you "overlay" based on...well... conditions.  A style is a preset format depending on the state (normal, hover, pressed,...) and is not conditional.

Why would you need to adjust your conditional formats unless you want it to look differently than before; then  yes: you'll have to do all of them manually.

If you have a lot of elements that share the same condition calc you can just select them all and do the work once.

 

[jjjjp]

When I received your first response, I thought I would redefine all of my gray colours (I use three shades in a consistent manner throughout my layouts) so that they correspond to the new gray scales you see at the top of the colour grid when you want to alter, say, fill or font colour from the toolbar. I could do so in a systematic and not-too-painful way across all of my layouts, but the problem would have been that a lot of the conditional formatting I use involves the same three gray shades, so they would be out of whack with the colour scheme of the new styles.

I therefore realized between yesterday and today that I should define my new styles using the exact same gray shades as I used in Filemaker 13. They just won't be readily available when I click to change a colour on the toolbar, as they were in FM 11. But I can at least save them to the grid of saved colours at the bottom of the colour inspector. They would be two steps away rather than one.

I guess the only real problem would be if I ever did decide to change the colour scheme for the entire database. Themes and styles allow you to do that neatly, I assume, for all of the elements visible on the surface of one's layouts. But if the fill and text colours one uses in conditional formatting are tightly bound up with the colours one uses in one's styles, as they are for me, there would seem to be no way of changing the entire colour scheme of a database without having to go in and change all of one's conditional formatting manually. It would admittedly be very tricky for the developers of FM to address this issue (perhaps by somehow creating a new type of state, corresponding to conditional formatting, as part of the definition of a style?).

My one other issue: Any idea of how to ensure that a button or a label align vertically when both are centred vertically and have the same font size? Perhaps raising the button or label by one point would work, but I'm not sure if that would be a precise remedy or an approximate one. I find the whole matter of vertical positioning (the way, e.g., the field picker sometimes positions labels higher than fields and sometimes doesn't) confusing.

Edited July 6, 2015 by jjjjp