Overview

A style sheet groups together a combination of font attributes —  the font type, its size and its style. The style sheets that you set up can be used to set the font attributes for objects in the Form editor.

Each style sheet saves separate sets of font attributes for each of the platform interfaces supported by 4D. For example, for the “Buttons” style sheet, the OS X platform interface could use Lucida Grande as the font, while the Windows platform interfaces could use Segoe UI. Similarly, the font sizes can be specified separately for each platform interface. 

In addition to harmonizing the interface of your applications, the use of style sheets brings three major advantages:

• Saves time during development: For each object, you specify a group of settings in a single operation.
• Facilitates maintenance: Style sheets modify the appearance of all the objects that use them. Changing, for example, the font size in a style sheet will change the font size for all the objects that use this same style sheet.
• Controls multi-platform development: When a style sheet is applied, 4D automatically uses the parameters set for the platform on which the form is displayed (if the object has the System appearance property).
  Note: When you have a form object that uses a different font from that of the platform, its height is automatically adjusted so as to be a multiple of the height of the font selected for the current platform. You should take this into account when drawing your objects.

Finally, 4D provides a set of Automatic style sheets that you can use "as is" in order to create forms that comply with the rules of each interface platform.