OSX Text field in Form…white on white…

[richard maliszewski]

I have a form I’ve been using for years for tracking SCUBA dives. Has 8 fields, all text. The last one is “Notes”, which describe the dive and critters seen. I generally enter dives on my iPhone and/or iPad, and then post-trip, cut and paste them from the desktop app into a dive-specific app. This has been working well.

I sync over CouchDB (self-hosted), and that works fine. For the trip we just completed, everything synched over…except it didn’t appear the Notes field was getting synched. I puzzled over this for a while, and finally realized that the text in the Notes field was present and in sync with the iOS and iPadOS versions…but the text font was white on white background. Dragging the mouse across it highlights the expected text.

This is only true for the most recent trip…in the last three weeks. Prior entries look as expected, but those were made on prior iPhone/iPad and synched pre-Catalina on (of course) a different Mac Mini. So I’ve got one equation in 4 (at least) variables.

I’d love to know why this is happening. Would love even more to know how to fix it.

–Richard

[Brendan]

Hi Richard,

It could have been due to a bug in a previous iOS version which had Dark Mode on the Notes field in iOS 13. The text would have been white in that case to show up on a dark background. But in the latest update I changed it so the Note field always defaults to Light Mode on iOS.

So a way to work around it is to go to the Default Layout on macOS, then select all the text in the Note field (command-a), then click the colour swatch button and set the colour to black.

Now click the “Apply Font Settings to All Records” button.

That’ll loop through all records and set the colour for the field for all records to the same value. That should then also sync over to iOS.

Thanks,

Brendan

[richard maliszewski]

So I had tried something similar before asking for help. Selecting the text, and choosing black from the color palette (presumably the thing at the bottom of window) sets the background of the record number to black, but does not change the text in the Notes field.

Have no idea where to find the “Apply Font Settings to All Records” button.

Tried going into Fields, selecting the Dive Notes field. Checked Value Color–it was black, but opacity was set to 0%. Changed that to 100%. Made no difference. Bizarre.

–Richard

[Brendan]

On the Mac version the “Apply Font Style to All Records” function is on the Default Layout. You click the little note button next to the Note field with the issue. Select all the text (command-a), then change the colour to black. Then click the Apply button.

[Daniel Leu]

Richard, is your ‘Notes’ field of type text or note? Brendan’s description is for a note type field.

[Author]

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