I agree with you Jens - move slowly on this aspect of the software. "Dressing up" the entry form is useful when designing for questionnaires entered directly by subjects, but will have little value for the investigator or data entry personnel. They are just distractions.
XML has very a well-defined schema for defining and using text attributes. I think that long term, the Entry client should have access to a properly-defined style sheet for achieving the styling of headings, titles and whole question/entry for fields. Personally, I would make this somewhat difficult for the novice, beyond providing a candidate style sheet as we have for Analysis. For example, the default style sheet could have defined styles for Title, Heading, Question, entry_num, entry_text, entry_date, etc and leave it at that. Allowing different background colours and borders for sections would be simple to implement, but should still be done via a style sheet or a style section within the project file.
When the Entry client is implemented for web entry, or as an iPad application, a style sheet will be required.
Jamie
On 2010-11-03, at 2:56 PM, epidata-list@lists.umanitoba.ca wrote:
I think what could be realistic to aim for is something like: at section level: choose background colours for data fields: show field border (implemented) choose font, size and colour for all fields (question text) for heading "lines" choose font, size and text colour for all heading lines
However I doubt if we will get to the point of applying underline, bold or italics for single words .