Report Font Setup Window

The Report Font Setup window lets you set font style for the different parts of the report. It appears when you are changing font usage in a column report template.

The following describes the settings on the window. Make changes as desired and click Done to save your changes.

Buttons for Report Sections

Click the button for the report section you want to change. The Font window appears. Make your font selections and click OK.

Horizontal Spacing Character

[Optional] In the Horizontal spacing character box, enter a character to determine horizontal spacing.

With proportional fonts, by default, Abacus will still place the columns or fields in the same horizontal physical location as with the original fixed pitch fonts. This process uses an average character width of a tenth of an inch, with an adjustment for Condensed reports. This gives you control over having plenty of space for the text without one column's text running over the next column because it contains a lot of wide upper-case characters (this is a common problem with other report writers). However, this means that no matter how small you may make a font, the amount of data that appears on a page doesn't change; you can't squeeze more columns in because the column widths haven't shrunken with the text. Instead, you get more meaningful white space between the columns. Also notice that if you make the body font excessively large, the data may not fit into the column width and can become truncated.

To give you more flexibility with these issues, the horizontal spacing character lets you tell the report engine to instead calculate an average character width from the character you enter. We recommend a "B". When a character is entered, the report engine no longer uses a tenth of an inch to determine horizontal spacing, but instead uses the width of your character. So, if you define a small font, you can squeeze more columns onto a report because the columns widths will shrink to fit the text size. Similarly, if you want to use a large font, the column widths will grow, and you will not be able to fit as many columns on a page. Notice that if you use this feature you do risk letting some data run together or get truncated. Different fonts have different characters that are wide or narrow - some script fonts have very wide Bs and will need a different character to control horizontal spacing. But if you want to create a tiny font with lots of columns, it lets you design some very interesting reports!