I am rather confused as to whether you want to talk about
accessibility of forms or just want to know how to create them. If
you just want to know how to create forms I don't know why a sample
would be applicable. Unless maybe you want to know how to create an
aesthetically pleasing form.
In any case maybe a little of both.
It is probably easiest to produce the document first if you are only
concerned with CheckBoxes and edits. Multiple choice combo boxes
would be a little different.
Turn on the forms toolbar by going to view/toolbars/forms.
Press alt, then control+shift+tab to access the toolbar.
Choose the desired control and press enter.
Then, go back to the forms toolbar and proceed to properties and press
enter.
At this point you can set the properties for the form field.
One thing in particular which I have been interested in lately is
creating help text for the form fields. For example, you could create
help text which would appear on the status line when the control is
selected. You could use this in combination with a JFW frame around
the status bar to announce the form fields as you tab. Then create a
detailed description including information about the default value of
checkboxes in the f1 help text. It isn't perfect but it could
especially help with CheckBoxes.
Go to the AddHelpTextButton to see what I mean.
Be sure to protect the form after you're done making the controls.
This will allow you to tab between the controls. Protect form option
is on the forms toolbar. Also, you may have to turn the forms toolbar
on and off if you are creating the document while making the form
fields. Sometimes it tends to get in the way. Don't know whether it
is just me or what.
I have asked this before but I will ask it again. I can see that it
is possible to use Visual Basic in JFW script files from looking at
the Microsoft Word scripts. I am interested in using this to
determine the status of CheckBoxes on forms but am rather stumped
right now as to exactly how to accomplish this. I thought I had it at
one time but now I don't have access to the VB reference for Word
because my help files are messed up due to an installation of Office
2000 gone awry.
It would probably help a lot of people if this was done. That is,
unless Word 2000 and JFW 3.31 will support these forms better than
previously.
If you do choose to make combo boxes I have seen this work well in
some situations with JFW and not so well in others. Don't forget to
use alt+down arrow to open them and it can be rather sluggish and
sometimes you might get the impression your system is hanging.
HJ can make all the claims it wants about how well JFW works with
Microsoft Office but the long and the short of it is there is still a
long way to go. And if I graded the usability of JFW with Word and
Office in general I think it would rate about four on a scale of one
to ten.
And if anyone bothers to read this far I'll ask a question. Has
anyone noticed inconsistencies in the reporting of point size and
bolds and underlining with 3.3 and Word 97? I have seen this on
several machines. With say formatting turned on I get thing like
this: Let's say I have an entire line of text with underlining turned
on. While cursoring down through the text JFW reports the first
character of the line as underlined then says normal and reads the
rest of the line. This is sporadic and sometimes it does work
correctly but if you use insert+f and test it maybe you will be able
to duplicate my results.
Also, when point size changes it gives the wrong sizes. This makes
the feature virtually useless for me as the only place I'm likely to
worry about that type of thing is in Word or Excel. I haven't
experimented with this too much in Excel.
There are other situations where it is very useful but not nearly as
in Word.
Also, I really could care less about how many pixels a line happens to
be indented. The last thing I need to try to do is compute pixel
positions to try to determine whether my hanging indent is working
exactly the way I want it...or whether the tab stops are set
correctly. Or, try training a new computer user to understand it!
So, if VB can really be used to get virtually any information from
Word and feed it to JFW why hasn't more been done?
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