I’m a font and layout junkie. Good layout is important, and one of my pet peeves has been the time I have wasted “fixing” the Clarion-generated forms and reports to use fonts that belong to the 21st Century rather than “MS Sans Serif” (a bitmap font from 1992) and “Arial”, both of which are over-used 20th Century fonts.
So I have created clFixer, a Clarion utility that will systematically rummage through your Clarion installation to replace the old default fonts with “Segoe UI” for forms, and “Calibri” for reports. All of these changes can be viewed, modified or disabled, since they are records in an “Action” table.
Whenever you update Clarion with a new version, or install an updated template, you simply re-run clFixer, and it will re-apply the changes as needed, and tell you which files were changed.
Clarion Fixer (Part 1): Using the App is my blog article that explains how to download and use the app, and Clarion Fixer (Part 2): The Code explains various programming techniques I have used to write the program.
Some of the techniques I have used will probably elicit a “no, you’re doing it wrong” response from more experienced programmers. I am keen to learn from you, so I can improve my own programming practices, and not write bad code in future. Please reply below, email me, or leave a comment on the blog. I am happy to receive constructive criticism, so I can learn.
FWIW, the code is also available on GitHub if you don’t want to download it from my blog.