Formatting Text Boxes

You can format Reports text, location and size of text boxes.

You format the text in a text box in two places:

• Use the properties panel to edit properties for the entire text box, such as the name, background color, default font and font size, and vertical alignment. You can also Reset format properties to Default to restore the default format settings.

  Note:

  The default font and font size apply to the entire text object to override the default font for text boxes with varying fonts.

• Use the text editor toolbar to format the text within the text box.

You can also format the display of text boxes in a report. For example, once you place a text box, you can move or resize the text box, specify horizontal and vertical positions for the text box, and place a border around the text box.

To move a text box, place your mouse on the upper left corner of the text box frame and drag to the desired location.

To resize a text box, place your mouse over the lower right corner of the text box and drag to the desired size.

To specify the horizontal and vertical position or to place a border around the text box, click in the properties panel of the report. See Adding Borders and Aligning Text.

To edit the text in a text box, click . See Editing Text Properties

Editing Text Properties

Text within a text box is broken down into text blocks. As you enter text, every time you press Enter, you create a new text block. Each text block can be formatted differently. For example, the title of a report can have a large font size, and the subtitle can have a smaller font size. You do not need to create new text boxes for each block of text. Click to view the text blocks in your text object.

Figure 5-1 shows an example of a text box with three text blocks:

• A report title

• An empty block used as a spacer

• Text functions for the report description and run date

Figure 5-1 Text Block Example

Note:

To insert a new line within a text block without creating a new text block, press Shift+Enter.

To define font for text:

1. Edit a text box.

2. In the toolbar, use the Font and Size drop down boxes to define the font.

   The following default fonts are available:

   • Liberation Sans (Arial)

   • Liberation Serif (Times New Roman)

   • Liberation Mono (Courier New)

   • Albany (Japanese)

   • Albany (Korean)

   • Albany (Simplified Chinese)

   • Albany (Traditional Chinese)

Note:

You cannot enter a custom size for the font. You must pick from the list of available font sizes.

In addition to the default fonts, you can upload your own fonts by navigating to the Fonts folder in the Library, clicking Create, and then Upload File. Uploaded fonts will be displayed in the Font drop down box.

Use the buttons to format text with bold, italics, underline, strikethrough, subscript, or superscript.

Use to remove formatting from text.

Use to select the color and background color of the text. You can also define a custom color.

Note:

You must pick a color from the color palette. You cannot manually enter an RGB value for a color.

Use to cut, copy, paste, or paste as text.

Note:

Pasting formatted text into a Text Box, copied from Microsoft Word or an HTML page, has some rendering limitations. See Pasting Formatted Text into a Text Box Limitations.

Use to undo or redo an action.

Use to align the text in a text block to the left, center or right of the text blox.

Pasting Formatted Text into a Text Box Limitations

If you are pasting content from Microsoft Word or HTML, an attempt is made to maintain as much formatting information as possible based on the currently supported feature set in text boxes. Currently, all these formatted text includes bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, superscript, subscript, foreground color, background color, font family, font size, and horizontal alignment. Any other features such as tables, lists and images will be removed.

If formatted text are pasted into a Text Box, then the HTML conversion may result in some rendering differences:

1. The conversion only handles inline styling and style-based tags (For example: <b>, <i>, and <u>), and all other formatted text are not recognized by Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

2. Font family lists are parsed and the first supported (exact match) font family is used.

3. All font sizes are converted to pt and rounded to integers, with absolute units using known conversion factors, and relative units using the default font size as the basis (For example: 2em = 2 * default font size 12pt = 24pt)

Inserting Text Functions

Click to insert a text function into a text object. For example, you can insert the current date, or the report description. See Text Functions.

Adding Borders and Aligning Text

In the report editor, click in the properties panel to add borders and align the text box within the report.

To add a border to the text box:

1. In the layout panel, click .

2. From the Border dialog box, select a border type (upper, lower, left, right, or all).

3. Optional: After you enable a border type, click the Line Type and Color drop down boxes next to that type to change the line style and color of that border.

Use Horizontal Alignment and Vertical Alignment to modify the placement, alignment, and indent of the text within a text box.

Automatically Size a Text Box Width using the Grid Width

You can automatically size the width of a text or note box to match the runtime width of a grid, when the report’s Fit To Page property is set to Width or Both. If you do not automatically size the text box based on a grid width, the text box may not fit within the page. This can occur when the rendered grid is wider due to expanded columns.

To automatically size a text or note box width based on a selected run time grid width:

1. In the report editor, select the text or Note box and click in the properties panel.

2. In Size Width to Grid Width, select the grid.

Note:

• The text or note object and the grid object need to exist on the same sheet.
• The text or note object need to be in the body of the report, not the header or footer.
• By default, the Size Width to Grid Width property has a value of Off. When the property value is Off the preview width of the text or note object is the same as the design time width of the text or note object.
• If a text or note object has the Size Width to Grid Width property set to a grid, and that grid is deleted or moved to a different sheet, the Size Width to Grid Width property will be reset to Off.
• If the grid object has columns with a Page Break Before property enabled, the text or note object width will match the width of the first page of the grid in PDF preview. For example, if the grid has 12 columns, and the 7th column has Page Break Before property enabled, the grid is split into two parts on different PDF pages. First part has columns 1 - 6, second has columns 7 - 12. A text or note object with Size Width to Grid Width will be sized to the width of the first grid (columns 1 - 6).

Example

The following report has one grid and one text box, where the report’s Fit To Page property is set to Both.

This initial report preview shows the text box which is not automatically sized to fit the width of the report page.

After setting the Size Width to Grid Width, the text box width matches the rendered grid width.

This report preview shows the text box width matches the rendered grid width.

Setting the Text Character Width

You can use the Text Character Width property to choose between more and less conservative sizing of text in a text box. The property can have a value of Large, Medium, or Small. By default, the property is set to Large. For more information, see Using the Text Character Width Property