List & Label has a sophisticated handling of default fonts. You can set a default project font and in this way style all objects that use this default in one single, central place. If the default isn’t good enough for an object, field or paragraph, you can choose to override the default for this specific object.
Up to version 21 however, you only had the choice to stick with the default font or completely override it with a custom font. So there’s no option to get “the default font, but bold”. We’ll introduce a new feature in version 21 that’s going to change this and allows you to just override selected properties of the font while keeping the rest in sync with the default.
The following screenshot shows the UI for this feature. The font properties are now enabled even if the “Default” property is set to “Yes”. For each of the properties besides the font face name and character set, you can now choose a value different from “Default”:
This way, you can change the default font and the affected object will use the new default font with all of its properties, but will always use a bold font face. A huge improvement when designing complex reports in a volatile Corporate Identity environment.
Leading the development at combit as Managing Director. Microsoft .NET enthusiast driving innovation & agile project management. Used to be a physicist in my first life. I love hiking and vanlife.
This is a great feature! Makes handling fonts more easy.
One more thing to round this up: You should provide a method (and function) to count all the used fonts and their sizes in a project.
When copying projects and replacing fonts from one customer to another it often happens, that I forget to replace certain fonts. In the end the design is not homogeneous. But what is more important is the degradation of speed and resources because of the unnecessary use of multiple fonts. For this reason I already wrote a designer action to find all used fonts and sizes, but sometimes in complex scenarios, I cannot find all the used fonts, especially when using RTF-fields.
Your new feature definitely helps to mitigate my problems with replacing fonts. But to know all used font sizes helps for a better design. So I can reduce similar font sizes to just a few, so for the reader or viewer of a document it just looks better and more professional.
Regards
Mike
Mike,
Thanks for your comment. I can definitely see where you’re heading for. DOM currently is the best way to handle this (as you obviously found out already). May I add your request to our feedback portal in order to have others discuss and vote for it?
As always – thanks for reading the blog and thanks for your participation.
-Jochen
A quick follow-up. By popular request, we’ve also added an option to change the font size relative to the default. Just enter “+2” as formula for the size to get “2 pt larger than the default”. “-2” woks accordingly.