To become proficient at creating custom screens, a good eye for field placement and sizing is useful.
Maximum positioning co-ordinates will depend on the screen size of the monitor and the resolution it is running. If computers with different display settings are in use, custom screens should be designed to be viewable from any computer.
The following tables can also be used as a guide.
Field Position
These are fields with a width of 50 spaced every 50 units. Each field below displays within it the field starting position.
Field Width
In general, a guide for calculating field size is to multiply the number of characters by 7, then add 15.
So a field that has a list of parameters where the longest parameter title is 10 characters will need to be 85 units wide.
This shows Field widths ranging from 10 units to 400. Numbers have been entered into the fields to give you an idea of the amount of text different size fields can contain. The letters ‘M’ and ‘W’ are wider than most characters, and therefore have more of an effect on the overall amount of text a field can display.
