A text field can contain fixed text, a property value, or the text output by running a generator. It also has a rectangle enclosing the text.

To create a text field:

The text content that is shown on the text field can be a property value, fixed text or generator output. To use a property value as the text content, click the Property radio button and choose the desired property from the list. For fixed text, click the Text radio button and enter the text into the editor field. To use a generator to output the text content, click the Generator radio button and enter the generator definition into the editor field (no name or header). See below for more information about generators in symbols.

In addition to the text itself, the text field element also has a text box. The appearance and position of the text box can be controlled by the Line and Fill and Position and Size tabs in Format Dialog (for full information on how to use these, see Section 3.1.3). If you do not want a visible box around the text, set the line color to transparent. If you do not want the background of the text box to cover other elements or symbols, change the fill color from white to transparent.

The width of the line effectively sets the margin around the text, so that a thick line will not be on top of the text. The margin remains in effect even if the line is set to be transparent.

The text itself can be formatted with the options found in Text settings tab in Format Dialog (Figure 3–12). The top part of the dialog contains the font settings. You can choose the font you want from the Font list and set Font style and Size in their respective fields. Please note that all fonts are not necessarily available on all operating systems or platforms. To provide better font interoperability between various environments, MetaEdit+ defines three elementary fonts (‘#sans serif’, ‘#serif’ and ‘#fixed’) that can be expected to display with similar results in all environments. These fonts are always the first ones in the Font list.

The Text settings window allows you to add such text effects as Underline or Strikethrough, define how text is aligned within the text box, choose the text and background color and set the Wordwrap (please note that text alignment setting has no effect when wordwrap is off). A preview of the current text settings is shown in the Text window at the bottom of the dialog. Please note that before a new text content is shown in the Text preview window, it has to be accepted in the Content tab by choosing either Ok or Apply.

As generators used in symbol text fields have no name and are normally short, they do not have a GeneratorName() header (nor the older Report 'name' ... EndReport). The generator is run with the current graph and non-property already on the generator stack. This allows generators to use loops to navigate from the current non-property into other objects, relationships, roles, or ports. They can also call other generators defined in the current graph type – indeed, if the generator is long it is often best to replace it with a call to one in the graph type. For more information about creating generators, please refer to Section 5.