Lots of problems with Layout Designer

[Randolph Burgess]

Hi,

I’m new to Tap Forms – I am running 2.1.1 (459) on Mountain Lion 10.8.5 on a 2010 Macbook Pro. I have used a fair number of database programs in the past, plus I have used a fair number of layout programs, e.g. InDesign, Pages, etc. But having just now attempted to create a custom layout for what will be a fairly simple database of professional contacts, I find that the Layout Designer does not seem friendly at all. Here are some of my problems:

1) The form name appears at the top of the Default Layout, but it does not appear anywhere on a newly made custom layout, nor does it appear in the list of Fields. I can see the form name at the top of the page when I press Command P to obtain a print preview, but shouldn’t it be both visible and editable when I am designing the layout?

2) There appears to be no way to duplicate the Default Layout, e.g. the Layout > Duplicate Layout command in the menu is grayed out when displaying the Default Layout.

3) When working with text fields in a Printer layout, labels and fields seem extremely difficult to align with each other vertically. I.e. there is no way to easily align text baselines. Alignment seems to be based entirely on aligning ‘shapes’ (the enclosing ‘boxes’ and so forth). This is not adequate.

4) Also for a Printer layout, it would be nice to zoom in and get a better view of what is otherwise a very small page. I can zoom in using the standard trackpad gesture, but when I zoom in far enough that the edges of the page are not visible, suddenly I can no longer select objects or work with them. I would really hope this gets fixed!

5) It would also be nice to have a visible grid along with a working zoom, for manual alignment of things like text baselines.

Any help appreciated.

– Randy Burgess

[Randolph Burgess]

I should add that even some of the filled-out sample forms that come with the application have misaligned labels and text fields – e.g. “My Movie Library.”

By now most of us are so accustomed to text not being particularly well aligned on this or that web page that we don’t look very closely at an app that has slightly misaligned labels. But designing a page for print is another matter. There I think we really ought to have controls that allow proper alignment.

If there are workarounds to help with alignment, that would be very helpful. There are a lot of things to like about Tap Forms and I was really hoping to use it for my current task. However if there aren’t any workarounds, then for now at least I’m going to have to look for a different tool.

– Randy

[Randolph Burgess]

One more note on this: I decided to try and live with the slightly misaligned labels. But when I went back into the layout designer, I realized I had a further problem: I am not able to resize the fields and labels once they are inserted.

At first I thought maybe it was just me having a bad day, so I opened up a different app (Pages) just to make sure my mouse & my hand-eye coordination were both OK. It was easy as pie to resize objects in Pages.

But when I went back into Tap Forms . . . same as before. Very rarely was I able to get a resize handle to appear for an object. It was hard even to properly select an object at times. I then restarted the app yet again, and selection worked OK again. But it was pretty unsettling. I’m not sure what is going on & whether it’s a real bug, but it’s not a behavior I see in other apps.

[Randolph Burgess]

OK, I see now that the print dialog has a “Tap Forms” pane that is very useful – among other things I see that the “form name” can be printed or not as one sees fit. No mention of this that I can see in the user manual; it should probably be added when someone gets a chance.

[Brendan]

Hi Randolph,

Thanks for your valuable feedback. I agree that the current version of the layout designer has some issues. It was my first crack at providing this kind of capability to Tap Forms. I have actually just spent the last few days improving the layout designer. The layering of objects in the current version is a bit wonky. The next update will improve upon that significantly. For example, all the shape objects draw in the background behind fields in the current version. In the next update you’ll be able to layer them at any level.

The Default Layout cannot be duplicated because it is not the same as a custom layout. It has its own code base which does things much differently than a custom layout does. For example, Note fields will grow in height as you add more content to them.

As for the form name on the custom layout, you can just drag out a Text object (not a Text field) from the toolbar near the top and type whatever text you want inside. So in that way you can have the form name positioned and styled however you’d like. The form name really shouldn’t be an option on the Print settings sheet for custom layouts.

I would really like to have the ability to align objects by their font’s baselines. That’s something I just started to look into. Right now alignment is just based on the borders of the shapes as you’ve discovered.

Thanks!

Brendan

[Brendan]

Also, you can manually align objects using the arrow keys. Use the shift key to make objects move faster as you use the arrow keys to move them around.

[Randolph Burgess]

Thanks Brendan. I had figured out the arrow key usage already – that is a familiar convention for me.

I am going to post a separate topic about a glitch I discovered with text fields that I solved but that was initially disconcerting.

[Brendan]

Hi Randolph,

Just wanted to let you know that I’ve just implemented baseline alignment between objects in the layout designer. So as you drag objects around, you’ll not only see the baseline for the selected object, but a red line will appear between the object you’re dragging and the end of another object on the layout which the selected object lines up with. It will snap to the baseline position so that both objects are lined up nicely.

Thanks!

Brendan

[Randolph Burgess]

Thanks Brendan. Will that be available in the next release or is there a beta I can pull down?

– R.

[Brendan]

Hi Randolph,

It’ll be available in the next release.

I’m actually still working on a few things in it. Right now I have baseline alignment working, but I’m going to work on horizontal alignment too. So, objects snapping to other objects as you move them left and right. Also when resizing. It’s a lot of work.

Thanks,

Brendan

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